This book examines communicative practices in a circuit-board manufacturing plant in California's Silicon Valley, where the employees come from diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds, their activities involve the use of high-tech equipment and their practices are shaped by, and sometimes contest, local and global forces. Analyses of the data show that learning occurs optimally when workers make strategic use of both their home languages and English within an ecology of semiotic systems. The book demonstrates the importance of accounting for multilingual practices in studies of multimodality. Through detailed ethnography it brings the reader to a better understanding of learning-in-practice in work environments, where the complexities and accelerated growth of new technologies along with a globalized world produce new forms of multilingual and multimodal communication. This book offers a view of the exquisite complexity of the linguistic and interactional activities that create the mundane world of everyday work. Kleifgen crafts her analysis of multilingualism and multimodality in a high-tech workplace with the same care, precision and creativity as her subjects craft their circuit boards. It will stand as a landmark study for the fields of language in the workplace, workplace ethnography, and informal learning. -- Charlotte Linde, NASA Ames Research Center, USA In this brilliant and engaging study, Kleifgen does what few scholars of language and learning have done: show us how multiple languages and modes interact within a technology production site. With an ethnographic perspective, she provides a penetrating analysis of communication adaptivity in the fast-paced production of technological products. -- Shirley Brice Heath, Stanford University, USA Educators interested in getting a deeper sense of the challenges and the rich range of opportunities that a multicultural setting provides, as well as linguists with particular interest in mutlimodality in high tech environments, will find in this book an enlightening contribution. Kleiifgen’s research, theoretical framework, and thought provoking contributions to discourse anaylisis theories invites the audience to reflect on their own institutional settings and how literacy practices and linguistic choices are managed towards better performances. -- Mariana Montaldo, Head of Special Projects Department at Plan Ceibal, Uruguay ― Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 46.1 Jo Anne Kleifgen is Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Education and a founder of the Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research has focused on multilingual/multimodal practices in school and the workplace. She has authored and edited several books, and her work is widely published in language journals and book chapters. She directed funded research projects on using new media to support Latinx adolescents’ language and literacy development. Recently, she supervised the evaluation of a program bringing classrooms in the US and Middle-East/North Africa together for online collaborative learning. She has been a member of the Executive Committee of the International Linguistic Association since 1991, has served twice as president, and is its current vice president. She serves on several editorial boards and has been a visiting scholar at universities in the U.S. and abroad. Communicative Practices at Work Multimodality and Learning in a High-Tech Firm By Jo Anne Kleifgen Multilingual Matters Copyright © 2013 Jo Anne Kleifgen All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-78309-044-0 Contents Acknowledgments, ix, 1 Introduction: Theorizing Communicative Practices at Work, 1, 2 Genesis, Inc. and Its People, 15, 3 Multimodal Interaction on the Assembly Floor, 39, 4 Doing Social Work: Power Relations in Interaction, 74, 5 Globalizing Forces and Quality-Control Certification, 99, 6 Learning-in-Practice, 129, 7 Conclusion: Towards a Comprehensive Understanding of Communicative Practices at Work, 164, Appendix, 172, References, 181, Index, 194, CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Theorizing Communicative Practices at Work A word is a territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor Volosinov, 1973: 86 Consider this scene: In a small plant that manufactures circuit boards, a machine operator and his supervisor are working at a computerized assembly machine, which has been programmed to load components on a circuit board. They are under pressure to finish a set of boards that is slated for delivery to the customer by the afternoon. They have just discovered that the machine failed to place three microscopic components to their assigned spaces on the board. This is not good news, as the machine's inability to place these components will slow down the rest of the assembly process. At this point, the machine operator takes the board to an inspection station where two women are working, and the