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Community-Based Language Learning
A Framework for Educators
Joan Clifford and Deborah S. Reisinger
Georgetown University Press, 2019

Community-based Language Learning offers a new framework for world language educators interested in integrating community-based language learning (CBLL) into their teaching and curricula. CBLL connects academic learning objectives with experiential learning, ranging from reciprocal partnerships with the community (e.g., community engagement, service learning) to one-directional learning situations such as community service and site visits.

This resource prepares teachers to implement CBLL by offering solid theoretical frameworks alongside real-world case studies and engaging exercises, all designed to help students build both language skills and authentic relationships as they engage with world language communities in the US. Making the case that language learning can be a tool for social change as well, Community-based Language Learning serves as a valuable resource for language educators at all levels, as well as students of language teaching methodology and community organizations working with immigrant populations.

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Doing Difference Differently
Chinese International Students’ Literacy Practices and Affordances
Zhaozhe Wang
Utah State University Press, 2024
Doing Difference Differently ethnographically recounts the stories of four Chinese international students navigating the complex socio-academic environment of a North American institution for higher education. Author Zhaozhe Wang traces the ecologically situated and distributed literacy practices of these individuals across rhetorical contexts, both on and off campus, and reconstructs the digitally networked, spatiotemporally emerging, rhetorically potent, and ecologically afforded literacy worlds of Chinese international students.
 
Doing Difference Differently provides an in-depth, nuanced understanding of the multifaceted literate lives of this often-marginalized cultural group, highlighting their diverse aspirations, personas, communities, challenges, and strategies. The book reconceptualizes the linguistic and cultural differences of Chinese international students as active processes of embracing, performing, resisting, negotiating, and redefining the identities that institutions impose on them through everyday literacy practices. Wang offers an analytical heuristic for researchers and educators to better understand these students’ backgrounds and to more effectively and ethically support and advocate for them. This case study critically engages broad and interconnected concepts that are essential to educators’ collective understanding of Generation Z students brought up in cultural and educational contexts outside of the European-American sphere.
 
This book appeals to scholars, researchers, teachers, and administrators working in North American higher education and English-speaking countries, particularly those in the fields of writing studies, second language studies, applied linguistics, multilingual education, literacy studies, and international education. Educators across disciplines seeking to better understand the growing population of Chinese international students in North America will likewise benefit.
 
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Hebrew Infusion
Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps
Sarah Bunin Benor, Jonathan B. Krasner, and Sharon Avni
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award in Education and Jewish Identity

Each summer, tens of thousands of American Jews attend residential camps, where they may see Hebrew signs, sing and dance to Hebrew songs, and hear a camp-specific hybrid language register called Camp Hebraized English, as in: “Let’s hear some ruach (spirit) in this chadar ochel (dining hall)!” Using historical and sociolinguistic methods, this book explains how camp directors and staff came to infuse Hebrew in creative ways and how their rationales and practices have evolved from the early 20th century to today.  Some Jewish leaders worry that Camp Hebraized English impedes Hebrew acquisition, while others recognize its power to strengthen campers’ bonds with Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people. Hebrew Infusion explores these conflicting ideologies, showing how hybrid language can serve a formative role in fostering religious, diasporic communities. The insightful analysis and engaging descriptions of camp life will appeal to anyone interested in language, education, or American Jewish culture.
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Learning American Sign Language in High School
Motivation, Strategies, and Achievement
Russell S. Rosen
Gallaudet University Press, 2015
Reflecting the exponential growth of college courses offering American Sign Language (ASL) as a foreign language, high schools have followed suit with significant increases in ASL classes during the past two decades. Despite this trend, high school ASL teachers and program administrators possess no concrete information on why students take ASL for foreign language credit, how they learn new signs and grammar, and how different learning techniques determines their achievement in ASL. This new book addresses these issues to better prepare high schools in their recruitment and education of new ASL students.

       Author Russell S. Rosen begins with the history of ASL as a foreign language in high schools, including debates about the foreign language status of ASL, the situation of deaf and hard of hearing students in classes, and governmental recognition of ASL as a language. Based on his study of five high school ASL programs, he defines the factors that motivate students, including community and culture, and analyzes strategies for promoting language processing and learning.  Learning American Sign Language in High School provides strategies for teaching ASL as a second language to students with learning disabilities as well. Its thorough approach ensures the best opportunity for high school students to attain high levels of achievement in learning ASL.
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Playing With Stories
Story crafting for storytellers, writers, teachers and other imaginative thinkers
Kevin D. Cordi, Ph.D.
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2014
It has not been easy to value play.  Mainstream culture urges us to rush and finish what we are working on to quickly advance to the next task at hand.  Too often we must punch our time clock forward without much consideration.  As the minutes and hours move, we indirectly communicate both to ourselves and the world no time remains to play; we must work. 
 
Despite that the world around me does not value play, in my creative life, play is necessary.  In fact, I have discovered it is the real work I do as an artist and teacher.  As a storyteller, writer, teacher, and imaginative thinker, it is play that has produced the most desired results in my life, in my work, and especially, in my creativity.   It is in play that we experience who we are and we begin to extend our choices.   Play is not consciously prepared; discovery that happens in the moment.   It invites reflection.   In fact, Plato once shared, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” 

 In this book, you will discover new ways to work with your story craft and find new story direction using play.  Indeed, play is a meaningful way to create and learn. 
 
In both childhood and adult play, the imagination plays a central role in the meaning making process.  Although there are many types of play: school-based, recess, sports, this work is rooted in play inviting the writer, storyteller, or imaginative thinker to make choices as they work to create meaning in their work.   
 
I will share how collaborative play can increase your choices when making a story.  You will find not only exercises to build your story making and telling skills, but pedagogy of practice to use when called to create story.
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Translingual and Transnational Graduate Education in Rhetoric and Composition
Nancy Bou Ayash
Utah State University Press, 2023
Translingual and Transnational Graduate Education in Rhetoric and Composition investigates the implications of composition studies’ changing terminological and ideological landscape around language and nation for the professionalization of future university writing teacher-scholars. As the collection editors argue, incorporating translingual and transnational theories into graduate pedagogy and curricular structures is necessary if they are to shape professional practices in rhetoric and composition  long term.
 
Contributors to the collection articulate the need for translingual and transnational sensibilities in rhetoric and composition graduate programs in light of the material conditions of graduate students’ lives and labor. They further present pathways for rethinking the design of graduate-level coursework, foreign language learning policies and labor, mentoring practices, writing teacher and writing center tutor training, and other professionalization initiatives. Offering a range of conceptually and empirically driven pieces, the collection brings together the voices and lived experiences of graduate students, faculty advisors, and administrators involved in the constant, necessary reworking of rhetoric and composition graduate education in a variety of institutional locales.
 
Translingual and Transnational Graduate Education in Rhetoric and Composition provides inspiration for graduate programs working to enact well-grounded curricular and pedagogical changes to counter the long-standing effects of the dominant racist and monolingualist ideologies in higher education generally, and rhetoric and composition studies specifically.
 
Contributors: Lucía Durá, Patricia Flores, Joe Franklin, Moisés Garcia-Renteria, Bruce Horner, Aimee Jones, Corina Lerma, Kate Mangelsdorf, Brice Nordquist, Madelyn Pawlowski, Christine Tardy, Amy Wan, Alex Way, Anselma Widha Prihandita, Joe Wilson, Xiaoye You, Emily Yuko Cousins, Michelle Zaleski

 
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