Diary of a Bilingual School by Sharon Adelman Reyes, James Crawford (review)

Diary of a Bilingual School is an ethnographic account of a year spent observing a second-grade classroom at the Inter-American Magnet School, a dual immersion program in Chicago where students from diverse language backgrounds learn academic content in Spanish and English. The book would be particularly useful for parents or educators who are unfamiliar with dual immersion education and would like some insight into the dynamics of one such classroom, as well as for reinforcing effective pedagogical practices for immersion teachers. In addition, it would be useful as a supplementary text for an undergraduate course on bilingual education.

Clearly written and accessible for non-specialists, Diary of a Bilingual School’s first two chapters (“Fundamentals”) provide a brief introduction to the history of dual language instruction and the founding of the Inter-American Magnet School. They also introduce the reader to terminology and theories relevant to bilingual educational models and language acquisition as well as contrasting constructivist with traditional approaches to instruction.

The introduction is followed by four chapters (“Narratives”) containing detailed, vivid descriptions of day-to-day classroom interactions interspersed with commentary by the authors. The narratives are structured around curricular units, such as “Nincas and ninfas,” which bring to life the interactions between the children and the teacher in the classroom, as well occasional exchanges between the children and their parents at home. The book’s epilogue “Outcomes: Schooling for Life” tells what became of the children fifteen years later and draws conclusions about the impact that dual immersion education made on their future lives.

The greatest strength of the book is that it contains a wealth of lively anecdotes that recount dialogues between the children and their teacher, illustrating and contextualizing the children’s linguistic and academic growth. The authors skillfully interpret these anecdotes for the reader in order to outline general principles of bilingual development in children as well as successful strategies for teaching in an immersion classroom. For example, the authors provide a wonderful illustration of early metalinguistic awareness in a child who, speaking through an imaginary English-speaking character that is acquiring Spanish, slowly alters a Spanish nursery rhyme, first through an Anglicized accent and later through lexical choices, so that the verses become bilingual. In the section “Counteracting the Prevalence of English,” the authors convey the challenges of imparting academic content exclusively through Spanish in a linguistically diverse classroom in which most of the children are English-dominant bilinguals. The teacher’s tactics for enforcing the use of Spanish in the classroom, including recasting children’s English utterances in Spanish and using visual aids and gestures to promote comprehension, would be useful for both teachers and parents in a dual language environment.

The authors’ analysis of the instructional approach used in the school, which they describe as progressive or constructivist, is more speculative and less research-based than their discussion of the impact of dual immersion. For example, they argue that “dual immersion tends to incorporate constructivist strategies. The fact that it does so may help to account for its academic successes, especially for English language learners (a hypothesis that admittedly remains untested by researchers)” (17). While it is possible that the use of a constructivist approach to teaching played a role in the academic accomplishments of the children at the Inter-American Magnet School, another possibility left unexplored by the authors is that dual language instruction promotes achievement through the very act of becoming bilingual. Research suggests that becoming bilingual in childhood through immersion education enhances executive function, a cognitive ability highly correlated with academic success, so it is also possible that bilingualism itself plays a more important role in boosting academic outcomes than any particular pedagogical method (see Hermanto, Moreno, and Bialystok, 2012). The widely touted cognitive benefits of bilingualism receive scant mention in the book; however, Diary of a Bilingual School does base its discussion of dual immersion strategies and second language acquisition throughout the...