While much research on language ideology has implicitly focused on adults, Janet Fuller's Bilingual pre-teens: Competing ideologies and multiple identities in the US and Germany places a younger age group at the center of attention. Pre-teens, children between the ages of nine and twelve, are the focal point of Fuller's book about language ideology and bilingual identities. By presenting ethnographic data from two different schools in two different countries, Fuller addresses the question of how social identities and language ideologies are constructed and reproduced through language choice. She shows how the choice of whether to use English, Spanish, or German is involved in the construction of identity and how these choices are influenced by macro-level ideological processes. Pre-teens are thus not too young to be aware of the hegemonic ideologies present in the adult world.
The two schools discussed, one in the US and the other in Germany, were chosen to illustrate two different types of bilingualism. The first setting is a transitional bilingual program in a rural Midwestern US school in which all of the students are native speakers of Mexican Spanish. This is an example of immigrant bilingualism, which is tied to low socioeconomic class. It also exists within the context of normative monolingualism in the US, where the ability to speak languages other than English generally lacks prestige. In contrast, the second setting investigated is a German-English dual language classroom in Berlin, Germany in which elite bilingualism prevails. Unlike in the US school, competence in multiple languages is valued and tied to middle-class identity. Since different ideologies are present in these two settings, different linguistic practices with different meanings are also present. Through a discussion of these practices, Fuller shows how the language chosen at a given interactional moment is locally involved in the construction of identity. At the same time, these practices are also shown to be connected to larger, macro-level ideologies.
The book consists of six chapters. Ch. 1 introduces key concepts along with the theoretical framework upon which the book is built. This includes a discussion of social theory, the social construction of identity, language ideology, and relevant research on multilingualism. Ch. 2 provides the background on normative monolingualism in the US important for contextualizing the ethnographic material on the Spanish-English bilingual program presented in Ch. 3. Ch. 4 provides relevant background on the German setting, while Ch. 5 presents the data from the German-English bilingual classroom. The book concludes with Ch. 6, which summarizes how the US and German case studies illustrate the discursive construction of both identities and ideologies.
This book should be of interest to anyone interested in bilingualism, language ideology, classroom ethnography, or language and education. Bilingual discourse is shown throughout this book to be far more than simply about communication between speaker and addressee.
