English, Israel, and Globalization: A Sociohistoric Study on Language and Cultural Shift

264 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009.During the past twenty years, Israeli society has been undergoing language and cultural shift, as it moves from the socialist and Zionist ideals of the kibbutz to a capitalist system based on global hi-tech industries. Accompanying this move has been a transformation in Israeli identity from a focus on the collective to the individual, and from Hebrew as the dominant language to a situation in which English is commonplace in many domains. In order to study these language and culture shifts in everyday literate activities, this dissertation examines multilingual (primarily Hebrew and English) and multimodal literacy practices across a range of contexts: popular culture (a men's magazine), an English language learning classroom, and a hi-tech company. In making these moves, this dissertation argues for a sociohistoric framework to link situated multilingual reading, writing, speaking, and design practices to wider institutional, cultural, national, and global contexts. Moving away from bounded notions of language, this dissertation argues for close attention to what Engestrom calls knotworking, the tying and untying of tools, texts, objects, and people, for tracing the ways global ecologies of language and culture are constituted in everyday mundane and routine literacy activities. This research also responds to calls in Writing Studies for understanding English writing in relation to other languages and the context of globalization. In answering that call, this dissertation offers fine grained descriptions of multilingual-multimodal literacy practices, which it argues are key to challenging the monolingual assumptions on which much composition scholarship and teaching has been based.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD