Palabra amiga: Domina el idioma by Alma Flor Ada and F. Isabel Campoy (review)

Alma Flor Ada and F. Isabel Campoy, writing alongside Gerardo Piña-Rosales's photography, provide bilingual students a creative and colorful approach to learning the fundamental mechanics of spelling and grammar in Spanish. Pitched as an orthography textbook with a focus on the written word, Palabra amiga: Domina el idioma is also interlaced with culturally relevant poetry, prose, and quotes from well-known and emerging Hispanic and Indigenous authors. In addition, the photography includes various colors and images that are often associated with the Spanish and Latin-American culture. These pictorial representations reflect the diversity associated with Spanish speaking people as well as buildings, landscapes and objects from the various countries presented. The authors integrate their background in children's literature by including their own poems about the written word as transitions between sections. Their past publications emphasize the need for creative bilingual teaching strategies, and through this reading the authors put the theory into practice by including multiple written genres within the framework of a textbook. The book is a written extension of their previous research to help promote literary strategies within bilingual and dual language learners. Palabra Amiga is presented entirely in Spanish and assumes the readers have advanced reading abilities in presenting, among other topics, an introduction to the metalanguage of linguists and language instructors. It fills a need for heritage and dual language learners who may have some bilingual education, but still feel limited in their academic Spanish writing.

The text is organized in eleven main parts with multiple subsections that in turn have their own subdivisions. The presentation is visually appealing with the intermittent use of examples of words bolded in various basic colors as well as the use of text boxes and numerations to distinguish between what otherwise would be a long list of decontextualized rules. The book provides additional cultural context for language patterns by including historical and geopolitical information, such as the well-known Latin connection to Spanish, but also the inclusion of Greek, Arabic, and the numerous other cultures that have inhabited the Iberian Peninsula. In this way the authors help explain the particularities and patterns found in Spanish writing usually unknown to bilingual and dual language learners. For example, in the section focused on the history of the language, they use the letter 'h' to show a pronunciation shift from an approximated 'j' or 'f' sound to its current silent letter status. The reader is provided specific words and phrases as examples, but they are decontextualized from authentic resources. As a continuation of the creativity previously shown through the inclusion of Spanish writers like Santa Teresa de Jesús and Antonio Machado, the text could include an appropriate quote from seventeenth century manuscripts that shows the use of the letter 'f' for the 'h,' such as in Don Quixote, to provide a contextualized example from an authentic source. In addition, the text mentions the indigenous Arahuaca, Náhuatl, Quechua and Guaraní voices to show how a multitude of languages and cultures have helped Spanish evolve. It promotes dialectical awareness by charting the differences that have resulted from cultural and geographical separations. For example, they include various words for 'corn' and 'beans' depending on linguistic influence. However, there is a tendency to aggregate distinct regional dialects at too high a level, such as Mexico and Central America, without showing the lexical differences between the regions as well as interregional differences that may be culturally significant to heritage language learners.

As alluded to in the title, the bulk of the book is based on the rules that comprise spelling in Spanish. Ada and Campoy introduce orthography with linguistic terms to help break down the parts of a word and continue to explain patterns through word roots, suffixes, prefixes, and other affixes as verbal endings. The longest sections outline Spanish spelling rules using accents, as well as by letter. Accentuation is organized through syllabic separation according to the Royal...