Explores language practices and discourse patterns of Mexican-origin mothers and the language socialization of their children. Drawing on women's own experiences as both mothers and borderland residents, the author combines personal odyssey with ethnographic research to show new ways to connect language to issues of education, political economy, and social identity.
All around the world, people speak, read, and write in many different languages. Some languages have different alphabet systems, and others make sounds that don't exist in English. Not only can our languages be different, but so can the ways we dress, eat, and greet others. When children come to the United States from other countries and need to learn English, they become English language learners. I Am an English-Language Learner introduces eight children from various countries who are learning English in their new homes. They share what they miss about their native countries, how they feel about living in the United States, and what they dream of doing. Each one has a new story and unique journey, helping everyone understand that the best education comes from learning about one another. This children's book introduces young readers to new customs and cultures through the stories of students who are learning English as a second language.
This book explores the ways and means by which English threatens the vitality and diversity of other languages and cultures in the modern world. Using the metaphor of the Hydra monster from ancient Greek mythology, it explores the use and misuse of English in a wide range of contexts, revealing how the dominance of English is being confronted and counteracted around the globe. The authors explore the language policy challenges for governments and education systems at all levels, and show how changing the role of English can lead to greater success in education for a larger proportion of children. Through personal accounts, poems, essays and case studies, the book calls for greater efforts to ensure the maintenance of the world’s linguistic and cultural diversity.
"I Am Whole is a delightful picture book to celebrate children of mixed backgrounds and cultures. Written with love to embrace the differences that come with being multi-racial, including language, family and cultural traditions. This book encourages children to embrace their diversity and recognise that such differences make us whole. A fun rhythmic read aimed at children aged 0-7."--Amazon.com
“I say that even later someone will remember us.”—Sappho, Fragment 147, sixth century, BC Sappho’s prediction came true; fragments of work by the earliest woman writer in Western literate history have in fact survived into the twenty-first century. But not without peril. Sappho’s writing remains only in fragments, partly due to the passage of time, but mostly as a result of systematic efforts to silence women’s voices. Sappho’s hopeful boast captures the mission of this anthology: to gather together women engaged in the art of persuasion—across differences of race, class, sexual orientation, historical and physical locations—in order to remember that the rhetorical tradition indeed includes them. Available Means offers seventy women rhetoricians—from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century—a room of their own for the first time. Editors Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald do so in the feminist tradition of recovering a previously unarticulated canon of women’s rhetoric. Women whose voices are central to such scholarship are included here, such as Aspasia (a contemporary of Plato’s), Margery Kempe, Margaret Fuller, and Ida B. Wells. Added are influential works on what it means to write as a woman—by Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Nancy Mairs, Alice Walker, and Hélène Cixous. Public “manifestos” on the rights of women by Hortensia, Mary Astell, Maria Stewart, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Anna Julia Cooper, Margaret Sanger, and Audre Lorde also join the discourse. But Available Means searches for rhetorical tradition in less obvious places, too. Letters, journals, speeches, newspaper columns, diaries, meditations, and a fable (Rachel Carson’s introduction to Silent Spring) also find places in this room. Such unconventional documents challenge traditional notions of invention, arrangement, style, and delivery, and blur the boundaries between public and private discourse. Included, too, are writers whose voices have not been heard in any tradition. Ritchie and Ronald seek to “unsettle” as they expand the women’s rhetorical canon. Arranged chronologically, Available Means is designed as a classroom text that will allow students to hear women speaking to each other across centuries, and to see how women have added new places from which arguments can be made. Each selection is accompanied by an extensive headnote, which sets the reading in context. The breadth of material will allow students to ask such questions as “How might we define women’s rhetoric? How have women used and subverted traditional rhetoric?” A topical index at the end of the book provides teachers a guide through the rhetorical riches. Available Means will be an invaluable text for rhetoric courses of all levels, as well as for women’s studies courses.
