...Thesis: All three authors portray the voice of many people, who, on a daily basis, are underprivileged of speaking their own language, thus, emphasizing onto the lives of linguistic minority students around the world and how they struggle to cope in school and at home. Audience: Class HUM-111 and Dr. Connelly Purpose: To highlight the difficulties students have at school and at home when it comes down to learning a language which they aren’t acquainted to and the consequences of such, depending on their social background. Reflection on readings using Comparison and Contrast Maxine Hong Kingston (Tongue Tied); Richard Rodriguez (Aria); Gloria Anzaldua (How to Tame a Wild Tongue) In the short story’s ‘Tongue Tied’, ‘Aria’ and ‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue’, written by Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez and Gloria Anzaldua respectively, each author interrelates the issue of bilingualism and bi-culturalism as a personal, narrative-style, life experience. Their personal experience all share the same setting; them during childhood deprived of speaking their own language, struggling to get through school and get accepted in the American society and the impact on their lives as a result of such pressure. When comparing the short stories, it is clear that each individual writer share several aspects in common, as well as differences. One of the most recurring aspects that each author conveys in their short story is the notion of one’s self recognition – identity – as...
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... Meisha Conrad April 28, 2014 Introduction Being a teacher at a Head Start/ Early Head Start program I have experienced the language barriers between teachers and students from different ethnic groups. I can say it is not easy when you and your students cannot communicate. Dealing with the situation makes you question yourself and how you can fix the language barriers in your own classroom and also the school. What can teachers do to overcome the language barrier in our classrooms with our Latino children? What are some activities, lessons, games, and etc., that we can do to make a connection and also help them learn? There are many ways I think we can put a stop to the language barriers in school. We may not be able to completely fix the problem but there are ways and things we can do to make our Latino children and parents feel welcome and comfortable when they walk into the schools. Communication is an important part of teaching because the children have to be able to understand the message that the teacher is trying to convey. Children also have to be able to communicate with each other. There are a number of factors in the classroom and many of these factors exist in day-to-day life as well, that can act as barriers to effective communication. Effective communication between teachers and students is also one of the most important factors in school, and without it, the educators' efforts go in vain. The first thing teachers must establish...
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...Ballgames,” and Richard Rodriquez of “Private Language, Public Language,” discuss language barriers in each of their articles. Sakamoto experienced these difficulties while living in Japan with her husband and Rodriguez struggled with them as a Hispanic child growing up in an American middle class neighborhood. These articles have several similarities and differences. They share common ground in that they both illustrate language difficulties yet they vary in regards to style and focus. Both of these articles depict the authors’ endeavors to bridge the language barriers they encountered. “Conversational Ballgames” reveals the author’s struggle to communicate in Japanese. Sakamoto states, “I began to notice that often, when I joined in [a conversation] the others would look startled and the conversation topic would come to a halt” (529). She goes on to say, “It became clear that I was doing something wrong, but for a long time I didn’t know what it was” (529). Likewise, “Private Language, Public Language,” shares a glimpse into the life of a Hispanic boy straddling two worlds: English speaking America in public, and Spanish speaking Mexico in his home. Rodriguez begins to relay this conflict with the statement, “In public, my father and mother spoke a hesitant, accented, not always grammatical English” (536). His portrayal continues when he says, “At five years of age, I knew just enough English for my mother to trust me on errands to stores one block away. No more” (536). Rodriguez...
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...destruction and aggression towards others. That in itself have made me have a whole new outlook on life. I’m very OCD with numbers. My life revolves around even numbers. I have to have everything on an even number or am overwhelmed with anxiety. When working with kids using ABA, it is all about observable behavior. Daily I teach these children how to fit in their society. We teach characteristics of the human behavior that are more appropriate for the setting they are attending. For an example; how to act and dress during a funeral or a wedding. Both events are filled with different cultures and diversities. As a therapist teaching the clients, this had made me open up and take in my own culture more. It makes me think what is different between my culture and the clients. I even adopt new cultures as I go. Before I became my kids step mother they were raised a little differently. I celebrate Christmas 3 times with different parts of my own...
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...of the rich and lyrical experience of learning bilingually. Studies have shown that multilingual students are nimbler, quicker, and are able to deal with obligations and resolve conflicts, resulting in an extra stash of mental sharpness of mind. Similar to Rodriguez in the “Hunger of Memory” Rodriguez experience bilingual education first hand. Rodriguez had to learn a language that barely exists in his education pattern without losing his culture, family and most importantly his parents. As a result Rodriguez had to learn how to control what he was taught as oppose to what he’s learn. Rodriguez continues to state that education was a challenging experience at first until he became fully assimilated. Although becoming fully assimilated under another language and culture was an overwhelming, Rodriguez decided to understand his obstacles of learning through trial and error with unexpected situations. Mainly steaming from his roots, Rodriguez gained a since of confidence through education despite his parents personal opinions. Rodriguez is a clear example of the success rate on Bilingual education for students...
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...dressed and presented to society, in hopes of preventing them from the teasing I was put through as a child. Religion: One observable characteristic is beliefs. I grew up Catholic, it was very apparent to others what religion we were due to specific traditions of the Catholic religion, especially during Lent. In high school, I made the transition from pubic school, to a private Catholic school in our community, which made my religious beliefs even that much more apparent. 1b.) Social Status: One non-observable characteristic is assumptions. I think most people make assumptions about a person based on their appearance. These can range from thinking that a person is successful to lazy and everything in between. However, these assumptions can be dramatically incorrect. Religion: One non-observable characteristic is perceptions. As previously stated, I...
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...expected to behave at school in the way that the dominant culture expects them to behave, but at home their family traditions and attitudes to education are different. They endeavor to cope with the changes of a new country, a new language, a new home and a new school. Many English language learners are bilingual. They speak Spanish at home as they acquire English at school. It is very effective when their parents speak, read and write with them in the native language. Home language use has a great influence on students both at home and school, as the student has to learn to adjust at school in the state’s language, which is different from their native tongue. That same student has to continue speaking his or her native language at home. Those students who practice speaking, reading and writing in their first language and become more proficient in their native language at home gain more chances to develop academic language at school. As they learn the content of academic subjects and English, English language learners have “more academic experiences to transfer” when they come into control of “cognitive academic language proficiency” skills in Spanish....
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...He felt inferior when he lived in Florence, he had a Spanish accent and his skin was brown. Feeling inferior in a white world, alien, and ashamed, he longed for another place to live, outside of society (Baca 4). That is the feeling of any immigrants when living in a foreign country and speaking non-native language. For example, when I came to the United States, I did not speak English because I did not enough words to express the thoughts in my mind. At this moment, I felt like a dumb and deaf person. I realized that I need to give myself a chance and I put efforts and do not stop belief that helps me to solve situation and overcome difficulties. As Baca reflects of his experiences in jail, he learned to believe in himself and to dream for a better life (Baca 4). Wanting achieve a dream that is not easy. He needs to be strong and overcome the difficulties. Similarly, author Richard Rodriguez faced difficult at...
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...him that will be fi ne, that I’m familiar with the conversational setup, and yes, I’ve studied a bit of Spanish in the past. He asks for my name and I supply it, rolling the double r in Barrientos like a pro. That’s when I hear the silent snag, the momentary hesitation I’ve come to expect at this part of the exchange. Should I go into it again? Should I explain, the way I have to half a dozen others, that I am Guatemalan by birth but pura gringa by circumstance? Do I add the humble little laugh I usually attach to the end of my sentence to let him know that of course I see the irony in the situation? This will be the sixth time I’ve signed up to learn the language my parents speak to each other. It will be the sixth time I’ve bought workbooks and notebooks and textbooks listing 501 conjugated verbs in alphabetical order, with the hope that the subjunctive tense will fi nally take root in my mind. In class, I will sit across a table from the “native speaker,” who won’t question why the Irish-American lawyer, or the ad executive of Polish descent, has enrolled but, with a telling glance, will wonder what to make of me. Look, I’ll want to say (but never do). Forget the dark skin. Ignore the obsidian eyes. Pretend I’m a pink-cheeked, blue-eyed blonde whose name tag says Shannon. Because that is what a person who doesn’t innately know the difference between corre, corra, and corrí is supposed to look like, isn’t it? She certainly isn’t supposed to be earth-toned...
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...Fall 2013 11/1/2013 Unit 3 Assignment: “How Do You Say It?” Final Draft Language and Translation Language is the basic tool people use to communicate with each other, including verbal language and non-verbal language. Language is used to announce, to persuade, to queries, to express emotions, to transmit complicated ideas or even to hurt people. Generally speaking, using the language correctly allows people to communicate better, compared with animals. However, we live in a big world, which has more than 6 billion people now. With the existence of many different languages, the issues of translation are generated. After reading Alberto Rios essay – Translating Translation: Finding the Beginning, I know Rios understands languages and translation in complex and stratified ways, from cultures and manners. He writes “Language is more than what we say – it’s also how we say it, and whether or not we even understand what we are saying. ” in his short essay (508). It can be understood easily why Rios pays so much attention to languages and translation. He grew up on the southwestern borderlands, having a Mexican father and an English mother. (504) The place he grew up is a place where cultures of the United States and Mexico meet and collide. Based on his own experience of dealing with different cultures and different languages, he points out how to say is more significant than what we say. The elements making his essay to be persuasive and...
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...Chicanos/nas in America, there are three separate groups which are Chicanos, Mexican Americans, and Latinos. Even though these groups sound closely related to each other, they have their differences. Some of the differences include how politically/socially involved they are, how much education they’ve received, transnational identity, and how much they...
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...thing that runs through the mind of many is prodigious buildings whose highest point meets the clouds. They think of bright lights and vast opportunity, and many unrecognizable faces roaming the streets. In turn, a small town may be regarded with thoughts of close knit community where you receive your diploma next to the person who you learned to walk with, small mom and pop business’s and friendly familiar faces roaming the streets. Big cities and small towns can be regarded to day and night, as their differences are vast and plentiful. Prominently, there is a major difference between many aspects of small town DeWitt in rural Iowa and metro city Miami in inner city Florida. Particularly differing in identities...
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...like any other child’s home video; however, the major difference between my home videos and others is that I am running around screaming in Hindi. As I grew older and began to go to preschool the videos slowly transitioned to me speaking English. I came very close to completely forgetting how to speak Hindi, yet my parents only spoke to me in Hindi at home. Even though speaking another language has countless benefits, I have always felt different from the typical American teenager. Richard Rodriguez describes how speaking a distinct language created a barrier between his family and the rest of the country whereas Audre Lorde retells her first encounter with racism when she visited Washington D.C. Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” and Audre Lorde’s essay...
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...already being altered to account for Spanish speaking students, and the lesson plans were being adjusted as to accommodate this newly found need for more Spanish to be spoken in the classrooms. The administration began to include Spanish enrichment programs and the handbook was published in both an English and Spanish version. When the district was interviewing new teaching candidates, it was required that they had some bilingual training, several years of college level conversational Spanish at the very least. This was necessary in order to effectively communicate with both the Hispanic students as well as their parents, who generally spoke even less English than their children do. And more teachers were being hired in order to accommodate the ever increasing number of students enrolled each year. You heard much more Spanish being spoken in the hallways, and most students generally spoke in a combination of both English and...
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...Ricans, and Central/South Americans have a lot in common. All Hispanic groups speak primarily Spanish and most immigrate to the United States to provide a better life for themselves and their families. Most Hispanic groups who have immigrated to the Unites States are either escaping political hardships, poor economic conditions, and or looking for better health for their families. Being an immigrant from the Dominican Republic I know how hard it to assimilate to the United States. My family migrated here starting in 1980’s. I came to this country when I was 7 years old. My mom saw this opportunity as a great one because I was able to start school here and get a great education and become part of the United States. My mom has since become an American Citizen, including myself, and even though we stay true to our roots and our believe, we have accepted the changed that the United States has offered us. Mexican Americans started migrating to the United States in the early 1900’s. In the 1920’s and 1930’s is the time where the larger migrations took place. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, many Mexicans came to United States because of the political instability and social violence. They came to United States for safety and the economical growth. Even though they live in the United States and the primary language here is English, they stick to their roots and speak primarily Spanish just like other Hispanic groups. Approximately 75 percent of the Mexican American population...
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