Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 13 (2022) Issue 1
Hochberg, Judy: Bringing Linguistics into the Spanish Language Classroom. A Teacher’s Guide. New York: Routledge 2021. (ISBN 978-0-367-11196-0)
Following up on her valuable ¿Por qué? 101 Questions about Spanish (2016), Judy Hochberg’s Bringing Linguistics into the Spanish Language Classroom (2021) is a practical reference that will help to enhance Spanish instruction at high schools and universities. The goal of Hochberg’s guide is an admirable one because it seeks to bridge the gap “between theory and practice with specific activities, assignments, and … PowerPoint slides that teachers can use in their own classrooms” (x). Hochberg’s extensive knowledge of the Spanish language and linguistics is evident on every page. What is especially commendable, however, is the fact that the book is written in an engaging style with an eye toward classroom implementation. Five essential questions, inspired by linguistic theory, provide the book’s framework. As the author points out, these questions are sufficiently broad for a teacher of another language to rework them for his or her purposes of instruction (7). Hochberg devotes a chapter to each of the five essential questions:
How is Spanish different from other languages?
How is Spanish similar to other languages?
What are the roots of Spanish?
How does Spanish vary?
How do people learn and use Spanish? (2)
To help impart the material, the book is supplemented by thoughtfully designed in-class activities and take-home projects, organized by students’ respective levels of Spanish proficiency. The in-class and take-home activities are all quite clever, and there are none in which students would simply keep busy or work with no goal in mind. A few examples of such activities are the simple derivation exercises “What are the roots of Spanish?” in Chapter 3 and the assignment mapping Spain’s minority languages “How does Spanish vary?” in Chapter 4 These activities provide the fundamentals for more comprehensive exercises and a deeper understanding of Iberian Romance languages such as Catalan and Galician. Several of Hochberg’s take-home projects are intended to be as fun as they are educational, such as the assignment to prepare Spanish dialogues of jerigonza (a language game similar to Pig Latin) with the help of native speakers. In preparation for this project, Hochberg outlines the fundamentals of Peruvian, Colombian, and Costa Rican jerigonzas and explains how practicing with them can help students learn to divide Spanish words syllabically (126-27).
There are also 304 PowerPoint slides (written in Spanish) that may be downloaded free of charge by teachers and used for their presentations. Hochberg references these useful slides throughout her book. (Had the book been written in the pre-internet era, it would have easily surpassed five hundred pages in length with the addition of the slides.) The PowerPoint slides, judged to be most useful for any Spanish teacher, are listed in boldface. A few of these slides are about Spanish-language recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the prevalence of the ‘trilled r’ /r/ in 279 different languages, Proto-Indo-European roots in English and Spanish, and dialectical features such as yeísmo, seseo, and ceceo. To facilitate the completion of in-class and take-home exercises, the book offers a wealth of databases and other resources available on the Internet. For one project, students are asked to avail themselves of a few of the innumerable online Spanish-language resources (both free websites and programs that charge fees) and to evaluate their learning experiences with them (121-122).
On the broadest level, the approach of this book is to provide Spanish teachers a more thorough understanding of the language and then give them practical advice on how to impart the subject matter. Hochberg’s many years of teaching experience have grounded the material in such a way that it is accessible and easily adaptable to any classroom. A familiar challenge for many teachers of foreign languages or linguistics is to present fundamental material by relating it directly to student experience. On the topic of phonology, for example, Hochberg explains that many of the same changes that occur in Spanish also occur in English. Many of these changes are occurring at this moment but, for their ubiquity and slow pace, go unperceived by most English speakers. A few examples in simplified phonetic transcription are provided by a speaker “who drops the t of right, modifies the ty of don’t you to a ch, or adds a syllable to pronounce athlete as athalete” (59). Hochberg may also have included the /tʃ/ produced by the -ltu- in words such as culture, or the loss of post-tonic syllables in words such as Florida (pronounced [ˈflɔɾdə]) or cardinal ([ˈkaɾdnəl]).
Regarding classroom activities, Hochberg clearly knows what works and what does not. For example, she understands the principle that student-led investigation often succeeds with the general expectation that results will be presented in class (or uploaded to be shared with even more people). In the project from Chapter 4, “Profile an indigenous language”, students are instructed to prepare brief descriptions of prominent Latin American indigenous languages modeled on the criteria of slide 4.44: the basic information (name, region in which it is spoken, number of speakers, etc.), a video of a speaker, a famous speaker, an interesting linguistic characteristic, and an interesting aspect of the culture associated with the language. After preparing their profiles, the students may present their information “in the form of a poster, slide presentation, or oral report” (87). Hochberg even scripts paragraphs of introduction in Spanish for teachers to use as they begin their lessons. Her enthusiasm for her subject and profession is obvious throughout the book. For example, after referring to a classic linguistic study about past-tense verbs (Dahl 1985), Hochberg concludes,
[t]his means that Spanish has a richer past-tense repertoire than other Romance languages and English as well as Arabic, Japanese, German, Greek, Russian, Mandarin, Hungarian, and dozens of other languages (21)
Hochberg also discusses contemporary debates surrounding Spanish. In Chapter 1 “How is Spanish different from other languages?”, she considers the authority of the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy) (11-12) and, in Chapter 2 “How is Spanish similar to other languages?”, she outlines attempts to make Spanish gender neutral by using alternative phrases or spelling changes such as the replacement of a’s and o’s with @’s or x’s (38-40). In Chapter 4, Hochberg also describes changes from “below” and “above” produced by the prestige associated with specific variants; currently the “northward march” of yeísmo /ʝ/ at the expense of lleísmo /ʎ/ is attributed to “change from below,” while the resurgence of the ceceo in southern Spain is partially attributed to “more educated speakers favoring the Castilian contrast” between /s/ and /θ/ (93-94). At no point in her presentation of these topics does the author weigh in with her own opinion. In the spirit of the best instructional material, Hochberg maintains objectivity throughout her book.
Hochberg’s book is a concise and useful reference for college professors and high school teachers of Spanish. For professors, the straightforward descriptions of recurring grammatical topics will provide a nice refresher; for high school teachers, those same descriptions contain some of the core information that will provide satisfactory answers to questions, perhaps even inspiring students to conduct further investigation in the language. In places where Spanish instruction is seen as little more than a curricular requirement – with the commensurate lack of enthusiasm for its study – Hochberg’s lively explanations may encourage students to go beyond, say, “boot verbs” and begin to understand why diphthongization occurs in so many high-frequency verbs. Indeed, the nuts-and-bolts explanations found in Chapter 3 “What are the roots of Spanish?” (43-74), are accompanied with enough examples for students to be able to draw their own conclusions when they have questions independently. One especially notable example of the functionality of Hochberg’s book is the manner in which she expertly condenses the 227 examples of phonological change provided by the Appendix Probi – a pedagogical text generally thought to have been written in the fourth or fifth century – into eighteen rules, which are presented in slide 3.54.
Hochberg’s resources are superb. For Chapter 3, she draws heavily on several of the most highly regarded books about the development of Spanish, including Penny’s A History of the Spanish Language (2002) and Pharies’ A Brief History of the Spanish Language (2015). For the linguistic material of her book, much of which is featured in Chapter 5 “How do people learn and use Spanish?”, Hochberg references key research by Labov (1963), Mariscal (2008), McLeod & Crowe (2018) and Zyzik (2013) (105; 128-29). Her discussion of the study by McLeod & Crowe is especially interesting (109-10) in that it shows consonant acquisition of children across twenty-seven languages. Remarkably, Spanish-language children acquire the sounds for ñ (/ɲ/) and ch (/č/ or /tʃ/) by age four, in spite of the fact that, with an occurrence of 3% or less, these consonantal sounds are among the least frequent ones in Spanish (Piñeros 2009). This and other aspects of Spanish acquisition presented in Chapter 5 – such as irregular verbs (115-118) and how grammatical gender may affect how speakers consider inanimate objects (124-125) – are what truly sets this book apart. Hochberg’s book is not merely about the Spanish language, but how it is taught, acquired, and used.
Hochberg’s ability to convey complicated topics in a straightforward manner will appeal to a broad range of readers. For example, the complex evolution of the Spanish verb system is covered by Hochberg adequately in only six pages. (Though understandably more thorough, Penny (2002) needed 89 pages.) It is, however, surprising that in Chapter 3, Hochberg did not include an explanation of Spanish adverbs formed with the suffix -mente. This is an especially lucid example of the grammaticalization of a recurring Latin phrase that was formed with the singular ablative case of the feminine noun mens, mentis. Spanish has shown its conservative character by requiring, even to this day, only one instance of -mente with two (or more) feminine adjectives (e.g., Jorge hizo la tarea completa y rápidamente). However, in a book intended to be a guide, the author undoubtedly had to devote her attention to bigger, more difficult topics such as gender, the subjunctive, por and para, and irregular verbs such as ir and ser. Hochberg’s treatment of the combination of preterit and imperfect tenses – a topic she identifies as “probably the single greatest intellectual challenge for an English-speaking Spanish student” (34) – is clearly the product of her large teaching experience. PowerPoint slide 2.30, for example, which begins with basic instances of the preterit and then adds examples of the imperfect to enhance the narrative, will prove enlightening to students and do much to help them develop greater proficiency with past tenses.
Hochberg’s book is a valuable combination of essential information and dynamic pedagogical approaches. Like an exercise regimen directed by a skilled personal trainer, Bringing Linguistics into the Spanish Language Classroom will get Spanish teachers in optimal shape come class time. Every Spanish teacher, no matter the level of instruction, has undoubtedly fielded an unexpected, flummoxing question from a student during class. However, after reading Bringing Linguistics into the Spanish Language Classroom, the likelihood of being able to answer such a question correctly increases tremendously. Hochberg’s detailed answers to each of her five essential questions, the activities and projects, the PowerPoint slides, and the wealth of information provided in the book’s appendices are certain to help both teachers and professors improve their approaches to teaching Spanish.
References
Dahl, O (1985). Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Hochberg, Judy (2016). ¿Por qué? 101 Questions about Spanish. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
McLeod, Sharynne, and Kathryn Crowe (2018). “Children’s Consonant Acquisition in 27 Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Review.” American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 27. Rockville, Maryland: ASHA, 1546-71.
Penny, Ralph (2002). A History of the Spanish Language, Second Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Pharies, David A (2015). A Brief History of the Spanish Language, Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Piñeros, Carlos-Eduardo (2009). Estructura de los sonidos del español. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.
Quirk, Ronald J (2006). The ‘Appendix Probi’: A Scholar’s Guide to Text and Context. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs.
Reviewer:
Daniel J. Nappo, PhD
Professor
The University of Tennessee at Martin
Department of English and Modern Foreign Languages
Martin, TN 38238
E-mail: dnappo@utm.edu
