Overview
This book examines communicative practices in a circuit-board manufacturing plant in California's Silicon Valley, where the employees come from diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds, their activities involve the use of high-tech equipment and their practices are shaped by, and sometimes contest, local and global forces. Analyses of the data show that learning occurs optimally when workers make strategic use of both their home languages and English within an ecology of semiotic systems. The book demonstrates the importance of accounting for multilingual practices in studies of multimodality. Through detailed ethnography it brings the reader to a better understanding of learning-in-practice in work environments, where the complexities and accelerated growth of new technologies along with a globalized world produce new forms of multilingual and multimodal communication.
Full Product Details
Author: Jo Anne Kleifgen
Publisher: Channel View Publications Ltd
Imprint: Multilingual Matters
Volume: 1
Dimensions:
Width: 14.80cm
, Height: 1.70cm
, Length: 21.00cm
Weight: 0.386kg
ISBN: 9781783090457
ISBN 10: 1783090456
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 28 October 2013
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
This book offers a view of the exquisite complexity of the linguistic and interactional activities that create the mundane world of everyday work. Kleifgen crafts her analysis of multilingualism and multimodality in a high-tech workplace with the same care, precision and creativity as her subjects craft their circuit boards. It will stand as a landmark study for the fields of language in the workplace, workplace ethnography, and informal learning. Charlotte Linde, NASA Ames Research Center, USA In this brilliant and engaging study, Kleifgen does what few scholars of language and learning have done: show us how multiple languages and modes interact within a technology production site. With an ethnographic perspective, she provides a penetrating analysis of communication adaptivity in the fast-paced production of technological products. Shirley Brice Heath, Stanford University, USA
Author Information
Jo Anne Kleifgen is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, USA. Her publications include Educating Emergent Bilinguals: Policies, Programs, and Practices for English Language Learners (with Ofelia Garcia; Teachers College Press, 2010) and Languages of Africa and the Diaspora: Educating for Language Awareness (with George C. Bond; Multilingual Matters, 2009).
