Product Description: Silicon Valley software entrepreneur Ron Unz took on the education establishment, both major political parties, the ACLU, and several activist groups with his "English for the Children" movement that began in 1996 and ended on Election Day 2002...read more

Product Description: In Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies, author Scott Wible explores the significance and application of two of the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s key language policy statements: the 1974 Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution and the 1988 National Language Policy...read more

Product Description: Since its initial publication, English with an Accent has provoked debate and controversy within classrooms through its in-depth scrutiny of American attitudes towards language. Rosina Lippi-Green discusses the ways in which discrimination based on accent functions to support and perpetuate social structures and unequal power relations...read more

Product Description: In this bestselling textbook, Rosina Lippi-Green scrutinizes American attitudes towards language. Using examples drawn from a variety of contexts: the classroom, the court, the media and corporate culture, she exposes the way in which discrimination based on accent functions to support and perpetuate social structures and unequal power relations...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: “There has never been,” Nunberg writes, “an age as wary as ours of the tricks words can play, obscuring distinctions and smoothing over the corrugations of the actual world.... Yet as advertisers and marketers know, our mistrust of words doesn’t inoculate us against them...read more

Product Description: The United States was founded as, and has remained, a land of immigrants, but immigration has always proved a complex issue for the country. This edition has been updated to cover new controversies and include up-to-date statistics on this perennially controversial issue.

Product Description: Ralph Waldo Emerson's dictum--"The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language"--belongs to a long tradition of writing, connecting political disorders and the corruption of language, that stretches back in Western culture...read more

Product Description: "Going Nucular," the title piece, is more than a bit of fun at the President's expense. Nunberg's analysis is as succinct a summary of the questions that hover over the administration's strategy as any political insider's. It exemplifies the message of the book: that in the smallest ticks and cues of language the most important issue and thoughts of our times can be heard and understood...read more

Examines how Americans form opinions on language policy issues such as declaring English the official language, printing documents in multiple languages, and bilingual education. This book shows that people's conceptions of American national identity play an integral role in shaping their views.

Product Description: Geoffrey Nunberg breaks new ground with this fierce and funny narrative of how the political right has ushered in a new world order, aided unwittingly by the liberal media. Democrats are well known for their "lousy bumper stickers," as Joe Klein puts it...read more

Presents a collection of essays that describe the values and attitudes of Americans that are reflected through the use of language.

Product Description: This book is provides a comprehensive review of the legal status of minority languages in the U.S. It also provides the historical and political context for the legal manoeuvring that culminated in landmark civil rights victories...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Rated "the best" on the Web in political satire by Yahoo's Internet Life, American Newspeak brings doubletalk up to date for the 21st century. An Internet favorite for many years, as well as a popular regular column in Z Magazine, Newspeak already has a large club of fans and admirers...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Bilingualism is a reality that many Americans still find difficult to accept; hence the prominence of English-only activism in U.S. politics. This collection of essays analyzes the sources of the anti-bilingual movement, its changing directions, and its impact on education policy...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

What sorts of cultural criticism are teachers and scholars to produce, and how can that criticism be "employed" in the culture at large? In recent years, debates about the role and direction of English departments have mushroomed into a broader controversy over the public legitimacy of literary criticism. At first glance this might seem odd: few taxpayers and legislators care whether the nation's English professors are doing justice to the project of identifying the beautiful and the sublime. But in the context of the legitimation crisis in American higher education, the image of English departments has in fact played a major role in determining public attitudes toward colleges and college faculty. Similarly, the changing economic conditions of universities have prompted many English professors to rethink their relations to their "clients," asking how literary study can serve the American public. What sorts of cultural criticism are teachers and scholars to produce, and how can that criticism be "employed" in the culture at large? In The Employment of English, Michael Bérubé, one of our most eloquent and gifted critics, examines the cultural legitimacy of literary study. In witty, engaging prose, Bérubé asserts that we must situate these questions in a context in which nearly half of all college professors are part-time labor and in which English departments are torn between their traditional mission of defining movements of literary history and protocols of textual interpretation, and their newer tasks of interrogating wider systems of signification under rubrics like "gender," "hegemony," "rhetoric," "textuality" (including film and video), and "culture." Are these new roles a betrayal of the field's founding principles, in effect a short-sighted sell-out of the discipline? Do they represent little more that an attempt to shore up the status of--and student enrollments in--English? Or are they legitimate objects of literary study, in need of public support? Simultaneously investigating the economic and the intellectual ramifications of current debates, The Employment of English provides the clearest and most condensed account of this controversy to date.

(view table of contents)

Product Description: In July 1992 Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) angrily suggested during floor debate ... that the United States should not continue accepting immigrants mho speak no English. "I pick up the telephone and call the local garage," Byrd said...read more

Product Description: Crawford takes readers inside the English Only Movement, revealing its destructive and xenophobic side. Exploring beliefs about free education, attitudes toward foreigners, respect for native cultures, and the fears of the "other," he calls for a new perspective and more liberal programs for teaching immigrants...read more

Product Description: Book by Piatt, Bill

Explores the political, legal, educational, and sociological implications of declaring English the official language of the U.S., and traces the history of American attitudes toward English and minority languages

Product Description: Book by Green, David

Product Description: As late as 1987, two-thirds of the Americans who responded to a national survey believed that English was the official language of the United States. In fact, the Constitution is silent on the issue. Since Senator S. I. Hayakawa first proposed an English Language Amendment in Congress in 1981, Official English has been considered in forty-seven states and adopted by seventeen; the amendment is pending in the 102d Congress...read more