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Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay.

The Education of Language Minority Immigrants in the United States draws from quantitative and qualitative research methodologies to inform educational policy and practice. It is based on cutting-edge research and policy analyses from a number of well-known experts on immigrant language minority education in the USA. The collection includes contributions on the acquisition of English, language shift, the maintenance of heritage languages, prospects for long-term educational achievement, how family background, economic status, and gender and identity influence academic adjustment and achievement, challenges for appropriate language testing and placement, and examples of advocacy action research. It concludes with a thoughtful commentary aimed at broadening our understanding of the need to provide quality immigrant language minority education within the context of globalization. This collection will be of value to students and researchers interested in promoting educational equity and achievement for immigrant language minority students.

Translanguaging: The Key to Comprehension for Spanish-speaking Students and Their Peers is a teacher's guide for effective vocabulary and comprehension instruction in the translanguaging classroom. Translanguaging is a new approach that incorporates students' languages and cultures with the goal of strengthening academic achievement. This book focuses on Spanish-speaking emergent bilingual learners, as they constitute over 70% of the English learners in American schools. Also included are activities designed for students who speak only English or languages other than Spanish. We provide teachers with practical tools for achieving translanguaging goals through a method called Cognate Strategy Instruction (CSI). The goal is to teach upper elementary and secondary students to unlock academic texts and meet Common Core Standards. This approach has been classroom-tested and validated by research in English immersion and bilingual classroom settings. This book includes detailed vignettes and over 30 lessons plans, demonstrating how to purposefully plan and deliver translanguaging instruction. Also provided are student texts, games, and assessments – all of the materials needed for a complete instructional program.

The United States is and has always been an immigrant country. However, it has always demonstrated a marked ambivalence towards newcomers. In some circumstances, they are seen as welcomed contributors to a multifaceted society; in others they are viewed as interlopers usurping depleting resources which should be going to the country's citizens. A major part of this ongoing debate centers on the languages which immigrants bring with them. For some, these new languages add to the country's diversity; for others the new languages are seen as an inherent threat to English and the American way of life. Languages in America: A Pluralist View is a vigorous response to this perspective by a sociolinguist and professor, Susan J. Dicker. Drawing on knowledge from the fields of linguistics, history and sociology, Dicker presents a cogent argument for language diversity in the United States. She explores the role language plays in personal and public identity. She debunks the mythology of America as a melting pot. She tackles common misconceptions about second-language learning, reveals the nativist roots of the official-English movement, and describes how other countries nurture language pluralism. Finally, Dicker asks her readers to imagine America as an open, pluralistic society in which language diversity plays an important part.

In Speaking Culturally Fern Johnson probes the rich cultural legacies and deep cultural dimensions underlying discourse in the United States. This culturally rich examination of discourse places the changing demographics of the United States in linguistic perspective and draws upon the author′s \"language-centered perspective on culture\" to illuminate the discourses associated with gender and with African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans. Language is placed in the context of the histories, multiplicities, and cultural themes influencing its users.

The poems, personal and visual narratives in this edited book, Critical Storytelling: Multilingual Immigrants in the United States, are symbolic of the resilient, transformative experiences lived by multilingual immigrants in the United States.

Despite shifting trends in the study of Oceanic Atlantic history, the colonial Atlantic world as it is described by historians today continues to be a largely English-only space; even when other language communities are examined, they, too, are considered to be monolingual and discrete. Babel of the Atlantic pushes back against this monolingual fallacy by documenting multilingualism, translation, and fluid movement across linguistic borders. Focusing on Philadelphia and surrounding areas that include Germantown, Bethlehem, and the so-called Indian country to the west, this volume demonstrates the importance of viewing inhabitants not as members of isolated language communities, whether English, German, Lenape, Mohican, or others, but as creators of a vibrant zone of mixed languages and shifting politics. Organized around four themes—religion, education, race and abolitionism, and material culture and architecture—and drawing from archives such as almanacs, newspapers, and the material world, the chapters in this volume show how polyglot, tolerant, and multilingual spaces encouraged diverse peoples to coexist. Contributors examine subjects such as the multicultural Moravian communities in colonial Pennsylvania, the Charity School movement of the 1750s, and the activities of Quaker abolitionists, showing how educational and religious movements addressed and embraced cultural and linguistic variety. Drawing early American scholarship beyond the normative narrative of monolingualism, this volume will be invaluable to historians and sociolinguists whose work focuses on Pennsylvania and colonial, revolutionary, and antebellum America. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Craig Atwood, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Katherine Faull, Wolfgang Flügel, Katharine Gerbner, Maruice Jackson, Lisa Minardi, Jürgen Overhoff, and Birte Pfleger.

The concept of \"funds of knowledge\" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents \"how to do school\" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristi