2nd Edition

Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border, Expanded Edition

By Tomás Mario Kalmar Copyright 2015
    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    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

    Biography

    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.