Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy

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 knowthe alphabetic principle of one letter, one soundto 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. Whats new in this expanded edition of Toms Mario Kalmars landmark Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy are in-depth commentaries from six distinguished scholarsPeter Elbow, Ofelia Garca, James Paul Gee, Herv Varenne, Luis Vzquez Len, Karen Velasquezwho bring to it their own personal, professional, and (multi)disciplinary viewpoints.