Learning English/Learning America: Voices of Latinos and Asian American

Immigrants must navigate new practices and the challenges that come with intercultural exchange and interaction. The authors advance productive strategies and views for more expansive language-learning approaches by grounding their work in narratives of diverse Asian and Latina/o community members who experienced the processes of immigration and transmigration and negotiated a range of developmental tasks--tasks that are generally not factored into theories of learning and development or classroom pedagogies. We are introduced to individual stories of hardship, alienation, and resilience from which we can begin to understand better the regularity of experiences shared by members of Latino/a and Asian cultural communities. But equally important, these stories also make visible the significant variance in how individuals develop adaptive strategies to assist their movement across borders--national, linguistic, and cultural.--From introduction.