Advanced Essay #2: Ashley

Introduction:

My goal for this essay is to have others who read it understand me and how it is that I was able to learn how to speak the same language that they do. I’m extremely proud of my first paragraph because it’s the part that describes how I felt when I was 5 years old. I’m proud that my language barrier was demolished and that this allowed me to connect it to literacy. In the future, I plan to go to lit lab in order to have it better peer reviewed.  

The Language Obstacle

It’s difficult to understand and try to learn a new language when you’re accustomed to something else and were taught it growing up. It’s also difficult when at home your family only knows 1 language, so they only speak to you in that tongue. Since they only speak 1 language, they can’t help you with your homework because they themselves don’t know what the paper says. They’re going at the same pace as you because they have to learn it with you because they have to apply it to their daily lives in order for them to be able to communicate as well. The only people you can rely on are your teachers and any additional outside resources, when all of your other classmates can rely on their family members. Once something is taught in class, your classmates can go home and just ask their parents for help because they’ve already learned this. Meanwhile, you go home to be just as confused as your parents, having to go bother your neighbors for help.

This was was I had to go through when I was in Pre-K, about 12 years ago. I was born in California, and there I attended school where people spoke. Once we came here to Philadelphia, school was very different because everyone spoke English. My parents enrolled me into a Catholic School, and when I started school, I had no clue as to what the teachers were saying. Everything they said to me sounded gibberish, I was getting lost in whatever the teachers assigned for homework because I didn’t understand them they taught it in class.

I remember what a typical day after school looked like for me. At 2:50, the bell would ring, announcing to the students that the school day was over and everyone was allowed to go home. I would walk outside, waiting to see my mom’s round face, smiling at me, taking me by the hand and telling me that we would be going to the library. All of my friends would say,

“I can’t wait to go home and watch tv,”

“I can’t wait to go home and play video games!”

Meanwhile, in my mind I would say, “I can’t wait to go to the library,” in a sarcastic tone. My mom and I would walk down to the library, from about 3 to 6:30, staying there just to ask others there for help. I would feel so shy and kind of embarrassed because I felt stupid for not knowing English. I would pick out graphic novels, just because they mainly consisted of pictures, so I could easily follow along with the words. After we got our help, or sometimes didn’t, when the homework helpers weren’t there, we’d go home and ask our neighbor for help. My mom would go knock on her door and with her broken English ask,

“Can you help my daughter?”

Our neighbor would smile and always tried her best to explain it to me and my mom because my dad was often absent because he was always working long hours. At the end it all paid off because I graduated being the only one that knew how to read. At the end a lot of the parents and teachers came up to me to say that they were really proud of me because they’d known how much I’d struggled. All of my hard work and efforts finally paid off, from this, I was able to teach my younger siblings English and when they came to me for help, I was able to help them because in a way, it was my way to giving back to those who helped me.

I would practice the English I was taught, just so that I could prove that I wasn’t the typical Mexican who knew very little English. There’s always been this expectation that in order for someone to succeed here in the U.S they have to know how to speak English, which I believe was a main reason for why my mom was so hard on me when I was little. “‘I want you to speak English. Pa’ hallar buen trabajo tienes que saber hablar el ingles bien. Que vale toda tu educación si todavía hablas ingles con un ‘accent.’’ my mother would say, mortified that I spoke English like a Mexican.” Gloria Anzaldúa writes about how there’s always been something set on us, that if we speak with an accent, then people will judge us and not want to give us a job.

Sometimes I feel insecure with my English because I feel that people will think that since I’m Mexican, it justifies why I can’t speak it well. There’s this expectation that I have for myself which is that I can’t mess up when speaking English because I don’t want to show that “weakness” that I ever had a struggle of understanding/learning English. As Amy Tan says, “Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me.” I believe that my parents influenced me in a way that I was forced to learn this language, they set me up to succeed, because they knew how hard it was for them as adults.

Works Cited:

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Print.

Tan, Amy. "Mother Tongue." Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers, edited by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford, 7th ed., Pearson, 2010, pp. 34-44.