In this critical ethnography, Menard-Warwick explores the role of gender as a structuring factor in second-language (L2) learning among Spanish-speaking immigrants in California. The book is exceptional in its capacity to address both the macrocontext of the learners’ lives (e.g., through discussions of neoliberal economic policies in the learners’ countries of origin) as well as the lived experience of the participants as they study English in an adult family literacy program. The book is also laudable for its attention to the diversity of immigrant language learners’ experiences within a community. As Menard-Warwick points out, many discussions of L2 socialization and learning in the field have tended to create essentialized descriptions of particular groups; her work goes a long way in changing this depiction. By examining the different social and historical factors that shape learners’ experiences, she demonstrates how family literacy practices in the home, availability of resources in the community, and access to support networks affect learners’ investments in English.
Focusing primarily on women, Menard-Warwick analyzes the learners’ identities through close examination of their day-to-day experiences and life history narratives to locate acts of agency linked to their English language learning. She also considers the concept of self-reconstruction (Pavlenko & Lantolf, Reference Pavlenko, Lantolf and Lantolf2000) to explore the tension between postmodern fluidity and the constraints of societal and social structures. She draws on Bakhtinian concepts to frame her interest in the tension between agency and change and, in chapter 1, develops the concept of trajectory to explain how she analyzes the women’s acts of resistance to and acceptance of particular gender ideologies in their acquisition of English and in living as immigrants in California. In chapter 2, Menard-Warwick places her work among theories of gender, identity, and L2 learning as utilized in ethnographic studies in immigrant communities. She emphasizes the historical specificity of identity, highlighting her focus on the past and present experiences of language learners as they negotiate their learning trajectories. Chapter 3 presents a thematic analysis of three learners’ narratives, revealing the diverse ways in which immigrants respond to the gendered subject positions they are offered. This thematic analysis continues in chapter 4, in which Menard-Warwick focuses on ethnographic case studies of these women’s involvement in their children’s education and the identities that motherhood affords. Chapters 5 and 6 involve a more complex analytical framework for investigating how social positioning is achieved in L2 English classroom activities and in narratives. Chapter 5 uses critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, Reference Fairclough1992) to examine what Menard-Warwick calls the feminized classroom, which often positions the mostly female learners in relation to their roles as mothers and wives. Chapter 6 uses tools from narrative analysis to examine two women’s personal narratives, focusing on the dialogic voicing (Bakhtin, Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981) that allows the narrators to position themselves in agentive ways with regard to the discourse of family unity, a central theme across the entire book. The ways in which the women achieved agency through positioning themselves with reference to their family relations is expanded in chapter 7, in which Menard-Warwick concludes that agency is to be found in the women’s recontextualizations of family-centered discourses that allow them to partake in new gendered identity practices. For example, some women were able to articulate English language learning as a way to help their families; the acquisition of English thus became a major aspect of their gendered identities as mothers and wives in the United States. Menard-Warwick ends the book with a discussion of implications for educational practice, calling for educators to make more use of students’ daily lives in their L2 English classrooms and to position women in particular as experts in their own lives.
Although the theoretical framework is comprehensive, a more thorough discussion of how theories of gendered identities can be analyzed through different methodologies would have helped to create a more coherent presentation of the study. The discussion of critical discourse analysis in chapter 5, for example, is quite brief, and it is unclear how this more microlevel analysis relates to the ethnographic approach taken in the book. Nevertheless, Menard-Warwick is highly successful in demonstrating the ways that learners’ trajectories shape the ways that they treat English as part of their gendered identities and in illustrating the breadth of factors and circumstances that can lead to very different experiences for Latina immigrants in the United States.
