Pushing Boundaries: Language and Culture in a Mexicano Community

by Olga A. Vásquez, Lucinda Pease-Alvarez, Sheila M. Shannon, Luis Moll

Overview

Pushing Boundaries offers a unique perspective on the ways bilingual children and their families use and learn language in Eastside, a Mexicano immigrant community in Northern California. The authors track how children use language in a variety of settings: home, school, and community. What they discover is that at times, these bilingual children use both Spanish and English in the same conversation and that they often help their non-English-speaking adult family members and friends translate and interpret the modern world. The authors demonstrate how ethnic children, in collaboration with those around them, learn to engage in meaningful interactions, to derive meaning from written or oral texts, and to use their first language and cultural knowledge as a critical component for learning their second language and its underlying cultural norms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521419352
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/27/1994
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.29(h) x 0.75(d)

Table of Contents

Foreword Luis C. Moll; Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Eastside: a Mexicano community; 3. Home and school contexts for language learning; 4. Bilingual children crossing cultural borders; 5. Negotiating culture and language in the home; 6. Moving towards a recognition perspective; 7. Meeting the challenges of diversity; Notes; References; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"The authors successfully integrate their studies to produce an engaging portrait of the language socialization patterns of the community's children. ...persuasive and passionately argued..." Anthropological Lingistics

"This book is sure to explode stereotypes with its convincing account of individual and family differences within a culture...also a vivid illustration of the potential for collaboration in research and school reform projects." Shirley Brice Heath, Stanford University

From the Publisher