Developed from a collaborative transdisciplinary analysis of transfer scholarship, we redefine transfer as a relational phenomenon to capture the “dynamic, emergent, embodied, messy” elements of writing transfer (Prior and Olinger 137). Relationality also highlights conceptual relationships in transfer research that produce seeming contradictions but are more often complementary than confounding.

This article is an ethnographic case study of a community literacy project that teaches immigrants to the U.S. how to get their driver's licenses.The article shows how perceptions of literacy change when project participants encounter the "rules of the road"-unspoken rules that are highly social, deeply embodied, and usually pitched by the powerful as clear, neutral, and necessary for survival.Based on qualitative analysis of written materials and interviews gathered during the project, we demonstrate how the community project activated analogic thinking about literacy.That is, realizing that driving rules are negotiable leads learners to realize that literacy rules are negotiable, too.

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for a video conference to discuss the second edition of Illegal Alphabets. Below are excerpts from their exchange, edited for clarity and length. Their conversation focused on the book's origins and the context of the scholarly commentaries that appear in the second edition. Kalmar and Leonard also discuss the book's contributions to literacy studies, teaching the book, and its lasting relevance to notions of migration, borders, discrimination, identity, language, and legality. Leonard's review of the second edition of the book follows her interview with Kalmar and frames its relevance to community literacy researchers, practitioners

Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border, Toms Mario Kalmar has composed a parable about literacy. A simple story used to demonstrate a lesson with "serious political implications" (xv), Kalmar's parable tells the tale of a group of "illegal" migrants in Southern Illinois in the eighties, working together to create an "illegal" alphabet to get by in their labor camp. After a series of violent events between the migrant and anglo populations in town, the migrants leverage their history of biliteracy-primarily among indigenous languages and Spanishto write English como de veras se oye, the way it really sounds. To do this, they break linguistic laws, creating bilingual glossaries that are governed by hybrid English/ Spanish sounds. The question of legality gives the parable its deep resonance: In order for their labor to have value, migrants must cross borders and challenge the laws that police national/linguistic geographies. In the book's terms of literacy learning, "the law itself poses a major part of the problem to be solved" (77). In other words, Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy is a story about migrants working at the borders of literacy in order to survive. That this story is true, and stems from three years of ethnographic fieldwork, makes it a book with lasting relevance for any literacy teacher or researcher working with communities whose creative, strategic, and serious writing work is marginalized or deemed somehow illegal.

This essay identifies the definitional confluences between transfer and translingualism and then reflects on the ways that each term might benefit from considering the other’s research questions, theoretical frames, and methodologies. While translingualism challenges assumptions about how to recognize and evaluate transfer, the transfer literature demonstrates the value of fine-grained, long-term, naturalistic studies of writing, a value productively taken up in research on a translingual approach. Ultimately, the essay suggests that both transfer and translingualism might best be understood not as prescribed pedagogies or policies but as terms with explanatory value: small theories that help open up changing practices in our writing lives.

Contemporary international migration produces a great deal of bureaucratic writing activity. This article reports on a study of one bureaucratic literacy practice—correspondence—of 25 international migrants in the United States. Contextual and practice-based analysis of data collected through literacy history interviews shows that (a) by virtue of living transnational lives, migrant writers develop correspondence practices that seem vernacular, but in fact take on the hegemonic qualities of modern bureaucracy, and (b) when composing everyday correspondence, migrant writers, rather than being subject to bureaucracy’s whims, take up bureaucratic roles that allow them to manage their own and others’ economic and geographic mobility. These findings complicate claims that migrant correspondence simply maintains relationships or fosters cultural cohesion. Migrant writers, while often corresponding to keep in touch with family and friends elsewhere, also adopt the practices of bureaucracy, becoming participants in the management of people on the move.

This essay examines the lived literacy experiences of six multilingual immigrant writers, arguing that their everyday multilingual practices foster a distinct rhetorical sensibility: rhetorical attunement—an ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity. Rhetorical attunement is a way of acting in the world as a multilingual writer that assumes linguistic multiplicity and invites the negotiation of meaning across linguistic differences. The essay shows that multilingual writers aren’t aware of this quality of language a priori, but come to know—become rhetorically attuned—across a lifetime of communicating across difference.

This essay explores the lived literacy experiences of four multilingual immigrant writers in the US, showing first, how they have moved their literacy practices among multiple languages andlocations in the world, and second, how these practices have been destabilized and redefined by the social contexts they have met along the way. Aiming to unsettle the assumed durability ofliteracy practices on the move, the essay argues that multilingual literacy practices do indeed travel with writers across locations and languages, but to uncertain effect. These multilingualpractices appear to be too contingent on social dynamics to be easily accessed and deployed. Thus, even when writers migrate with fully developed multilingual repertoires—including fluency in English—they do not always experience the social mobility often promised.