ebook9781317620105d4325

Description

How do “illegal aliens” chart the speech sounds of colloquial English? This book is timeless in offering an unusually direct entry into how a group of Mexican fruit pickers analyze their first encounter with local American speech in a tiny rural Midwestern community in the United States. Readers see close up how intelligently migrant workers help each other use what they already know‚Äîthe alphabetic principle of one letter, one sound‚Äîto teach each other, from scratch, at the very first contact, a language which none of them can speak. They see how and why the strategies adult immigrants actually use in order to cope with English in the real world seem to have little in common with those used in publicly funded bilingual and ESL classrooms. What‚Äôs new in this expanded edition of Tom√°s Mario Kalmar‚Äôs landmark Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy are in-depth commentaries from six distinguished scholars‚ÄîPeter Elbow, Ofelia Garc√≠a, James Paul Gee, Herv√© Varenne, Luis V√°zquez Le√≥n, Karen Velasquez‚Äîwho bring to it their own personal, professional, and (multi)disciplinary viewpoints.