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 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.
What's new in this expanded edition of Tomás Mario Kalmar's landmark Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy are in-depth commentaries from six distinguished scholars-Peter Elbow, Ofelia García, James Paul Gee, Hervé Varenne, Luis Vázquez León, Karen Velasquez-who bring to it their own personal, professional, and (multi)disciplinary viewpoints.

Tomás Mario Kalmar organized Paulo Freire's visit to Sydney in 1974 and served as his interpreter. He has helped to launch a wide variety of innovative educational projects for children and adults, ranging from Su Casa Migrant Head Start in southern Illinois to California State University Monterey Bay. Currently he is Co-Director, Community Learning Center, International Sonoran Desert Alliance, USA.

Gracias/Acknowledgments Note on the Second Edition Prologue 1 No Man's Land I Líricamente II The Death of Leonardo III Doló Dasnt Protect As 2 The Cobden Glossaries I Constructing a Hybrid Alphabet II A Kind of Algebraic Notation III New Contexts, New Texts, Same Moves IV A Scene of Writing: The Village Hall V The Cobden Glossaries 3 Some Laugh, Others Frown I "Is This Text a Joke, or What?" II Cracking the Ninth-Century Code III Three Ways of Reading a Cobden Glossary IV Freirean Dilemmas V Wallerstein on the Case of the Cobden Glossaries VI Conclusion 4 Making It Legal: The Social Construction of Hybrid Alphabets Strictly Speaking: Emic vs Etic II Writing in the No-Man's Land Between Languages III How to Legitimize a Hybrid Alphabet Epilogue: A Game as Old as the Alphabet? Commentaries Opting for the vernacular Peter Elbow Translanguaging and abecedarios ilegales Ofelia García Ways with letters and sounds James Paul Gee The power of the single case Hervé Varenne Ethnomethodology and mestizaje: the Cherán Connection Luis Vázquez León Panchaan Karen Velasquez Afterword Tomás Mario Kalmar List of Contributors References Author Index Subject Index