Book Review Working Spanish for Teachers and Education Professionals by Gail Stein

Teachers and education professionals face lots of challenges teaching in today's schools. One of the challenges is communicating with students and parents who speak Spanish as their primary language. Some teachers have taken Spanish classes; others have not. Even when the teachers have several years of Spanish language training under their belt, there are occasionally times when they do not know the proper way to say something when dealing with their Spanish-speaking students and parents.

Working Spanish for Teachers and Education Professionals by Gail Stein is designed to address this difficulty. At first glance, this book does not look promising; this initial impression is actually wrong. While the first few pages cover things that any first year student in college level Spanish should know, these pages are important for teachers and administrators who have not taken any Spanish or have forgotten what little they have learned.

At the start of the book is a pronunciation guide. Throughout the rest of the book, all the Spanish words and phrases is accompanied with pronunciation. Numbers (both cardinal and ordinal), time, calendar, and weather are also included. After this basic information comes the meat of the book.

This is a phrasebook. The phrases run the gamut from those which will be used by those dealing with day care and pre-k students to those which address issues with high school students; there is also a section addressing special need students. There are basic classroom commands, and phrases dealing with common classroom discipline problems. It is these phrases that are the meat of this book. A lot I have never encountered in any other phrasebook, and are definitely of interest to teachers.

It is at this point of this book review that I must make a confession. I know just enough Spanish to recognize it when I encounter it. My own foreign language training was in French; I also know a few words of Hebrew and Aramaic (my small library of phrase books and dictionaries focus on these two languages). I am also not a teacher or education professional. At this point, you are quite correct to ask how I can review a book addressing the needs of a profession that I do not work in, and about a language that I do not personally speak.

The answer is simple: I handed the book to my wife. She has taken several years of Spanish, has spent a decade teaching various grade levels (elementary to high school), and is currently taking Master classes focusing on teaching ESL (English as second language) students. After handing the book to my wife, I watched her leaf though the book and made mental notes about what she said.

She immediately found a couple of phrases that she did not know. She also found a couple of sentences that she could have used earlier that very day. She pointed out that even the principal of the school, who has never taken any Spanish, could use this book, thanks to the pronunciation accompaniment. My wife especially liked the size of the book; it is small enough to keep in her desk.

Based on her comments, my own expectations of what the book should cover, and the fact that she took the book with her to work, this book gets four out of five stars. My only concern with this book is that is does not have an index, and is only English to Spanish, which makes it more suitable for those teachers who have a couple of semesters of Spanish under that belt than those who have none.

Gail Stein: Working Spanish for Teachers and Education Professionals (Hoboken: Wiley 2007).