Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy

Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border, Expanded Edition

By: TomÃ¡s Mario Kalmar

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Paperback | 5 March 2015 | Edition Number 2

At a Glance

Paperback
194 Pages

Edition Type
New edition

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 1.04

Paperback

RRP $103.00

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In this new expanded edition Tomas Mario Kalmar's landmark Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy, commentaries by luminaries in New Literacies Studies, anthropology, and sociolinguistics bring to it their own personal, professional, and (multi)disciplinary viewpoints, sharpening the socioeconomic, political, and educational implications for these fields and extending its relevance to readers in Latin American Studies and the new and rapidly expanding fields of Migrant Studies and Border Studies.

When people today argue about "illegal aliens" in the United States, probably the last question on their minds is the one to which this book is devoted: how do "illegal aliens" use an alphabet they already know in order to chart the speech sounds of colloquial English? The book is timeless in offering an unusually direct entry into how a group of "illegal aliens" conceptualize their initial encounter with local American speech in a tiny rural Midwestern community in the United States; the level of concrete detail is distinctive among the many current discussions on the hot topic of "undocumented migrants." Readers see close up how intelligently migrant workers help each other use what they already know-the alphabetic principle of one letter, one sound-to 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. The book includes a discussion of the ideal of a universal alphabet, about the utopian claim that anyone can use a canonical set of 26 letters to reduce to script any language, ever spoken by anyone, anywhere, at any time.

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