How I Learned EnglishHow I Learned English
55 Accomplished Latinos Recall Lessons in Language and Life
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Book, 2007
Current format, Book, 2007, , No Longer Available.Book, 2007
Current format, Book, 2007, , No Longer Available. Offered in 0 more formatsIn this collection of 55 short essays (some excerpted and some newly written) edited by award-winning travel author Miller (Panama Hat Trail), successful Latinos write personal accounts of how they learned English and the impact this had on their lives. The contributors range from notable writers to television personalities, from military officers to successful business leaders. All learned English not only in the classroom but also from television, radio, and the movies, encountering a different language as well as a different culture. The stories are funny (e.g., artist Enrique Mart!nez Celaya accidentally using the English word constipated to describe being ill) and poignant (e.g., poet and doctor Rafael Campo losing the ability to speak Spanish to a grandparent). The essays cover issues that affect any immigrant population: the navigating of two worlds, language learning as lifelong learning, and the importance of bilingualism and maintaining connection to a native culture. A timely book, as immigration and bilingual education are current topics of debate in this country. Recommended for all public libraries, especially those serving Spanish-speaking or immigrant populations.-Jennifer Zarr, NYPL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Veteran travel writer Miller (On the Border) has put together a substantial volume on language, knowledge and cultural assimilation, gathering essays and excerpts from more than 50 authors, poets, professional athletes and musicians, doctors and politicians who took up English as a second (or third, or fourth) language. As PBS correspondent Ray Suarez notes in the foreword, for many "the need to learn English was accompanied by wrenching personal circumstances: exile, illness, economic migration, family dissolution," but it was also "a proffered ticket to... the modern and changing world." In a piece from 1982?s Hunger of Memory, for example, Richard Rodriguez recalls distinctions he made as a child between a private and a public language-Spanish had always been his to use, but English, what he needed for school, felt more difficult to embrace. In a selection from her 2001 memoir American Chica, Washington Post books editor Marie Arana tells how she feigned ignorance of English on her first day at a new elementary school so she?d be funneled into the Spanish-speaking class. Other contributors such as Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Walter Mercado, Enrique Fernandez and Daisy Zamora provide nuanced perspectives on the ongoing immigration debate, putting faces to the statistics and concrete meaning to broad points of policy and ideology. (Sept.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
Veteran travel writer Miller (On the Border) has put together a substantial volume on language, knowledge and cultural assimilation, gathering essays and excerpts from more than 50 authors, poets, professional athletes and musicians, doctors and politicians who took up English as a second (or third, or fourth) language. As PBS correspondent Ray Suarez notes in the foreword, for many "the need to learn English was accompanied by wrenching personal circumstances: exile, illness, economic migration, family dissolution," but it was also "a proffered ticket to... the modern and changing world." In a piece from 1982?s Hunger of Memory, for example, Richard Rodriguez recalls distinctions he made as a child between a private and a public language-Spanish had always been his to use, but English, what he needed for school, felt more difficult to embrace. In a selection from her 2001 memoir American Chica, Washington Post books editor Marie Arana tells how she feigned ignorance of English on her first day at a new elementary school so she?d be funneled into the Spanish-speaking class. Other contributors such as Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Walter Mercado, Enrique Fernandez and Daisy Zamora provide nuanced perspectives on the ongoing immigration debate, putting faces to the statistics and concrete meaning to broad points of policy and ideology. (Sept.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
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- Washington, DC : National Geographic, [2007], ©2007.
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