Description:
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.
Brief description:
Jo Anne Kleifgen is Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Education and a founder of the Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research has focused on multilingual/multimodal practices in school and the workplace. She has authored and edited several books, and her work is widely published in language journals and book chapters. She directed funded research projects on using new media to support Latinx adolescents' language and literacy development. Recently, she supervised the evaluation of a program bringing classrooms in the US and Middle-East/North Africa together for online collaborative learning. She has been a member of the Executive Committee of the International Linguistic Association since 1991, has served twice as president, and is its current vice president. She serves on several editorial boards and has been a visiting scholar at universities in the U.S. and abroad.
Review Quotes:
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