He supports this argument by telling his own story of being forced to learn English by the bilingual education system. The experience he had learning English made him experience great embarrassment, sadness, and change. Rodriguez concludes his experience by discussing how English had changed his personal life at home: “We remained a loving family, but one greatly changed. No longer so close;no longer bound tight by the pleasing and troubling knowledge of our public separateness.” By learning English, Rodriguez’s family is finally able to integrate into society without language barriers.
Very few, if any, immigrants have the chance to learn English before traveling to the U.S. Because of this barrier, it is nearly impossible for organizations such as the Border Patrol to warn, aid, and communicate with them as they travel to the U.S. Although there are helpful signs along the border, they are written in English and are therefore indecipherable. Furthermore, the language border hinders an immigrant’s ability to survive in American society once they arrive. English is the written and spoken language in almost every city, thwarting immigrants’ opportunity to find jobs and interact with others. As they struggle to communicate, they become ostracized and do not fit in.
My Rhetorical Analysis Language is a part one’s identity and culture, which allows one to communicate with those of the same group, although when spoken to someone of another group, it can cause a language barrier or miscommunication in many different ways. In Gloria Anzaldua’s article, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, which was taken from her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, she is trying to inform her readers that her language is what defines her. She began to mention how she was being criticized by both English and Spanish Speakers, although they both make up who she is as a person. Then, she gave convincing personal experiences about how it was to be a Chicana and their different types of languages. Moreover, despite the fact that her language was considered illegitimate, Anzaldua made it clear that she cannot get rid of it until the day she dies, or as she states (on page 26) “Wild tongues can’t be, they can only be cut out.”
Imagine what it is like to be seven years old moving to a country where you don’t know anyone, you don’t understand the language, and everything seems foreign. When I first arrived to the United States, I didn’t have friends due to my inability to speak English. It wasn’t an easy journey, but my determination to achieve the American Dream gave me strength to keep going. I decided to take English courses during my free time, and now I am a great writer who is fluent in both English and Spanish.
In her article, “Teach Them Spanish Early, Too,” Carlene Carmichael questions why young Californians are not being taught a basic understanding of both the English and the Spanish language. Carmichael contends that more job opportunities are available to bilingual applicants. She suggest that children could be taught both languages together from a young age. Carmichael pities the many Americans who are barred from employment at bilingual businesses because of this disadvantage and she wonders if anyone else feels the same. Carmichael’s suggestion to offer Spanish curriculum to young children and teach both English and Spanish at the same time makes a lot of sense; After all, California does recognize both English and Spanish as official
In his article, Dan Carsen discusses the challenges with bilingual education in the Southern United States. Although he recognizes the obstacles present in this system, Carsen does argue for bilingual education. By appealing to ethos, pathos, and logos, Carsen properly describes the difficulties and importance in implementing bilingual education in the South. Carsen successfully appeals to ethos by conducting several personal interviews to capture real-world experiences. The first interview mentioned in the article is with Angelina Baltazar, a bilingual student at Tarrant High School.
In the online article by Max J. Castro, Ph. D, The Future of Spanish in the United States, the author effectively uses his credibility to link facts and history of other languages to Spanish along with appealing to the reader’s emotions to explain why the longevity of the Spanish language is possibly threatened in the United States. In his article, Castro refers to a plethora of statistical information about Spanish as a language in the United States, including that it is predicted to be the largest Spanish speaking country in the world by 2050. Even today Spanish is by far the second most spoken language in America, second only to English. Although the amount of Spanish speakers is increasing, Castro also mentions in his article, largely concerned,
In this article, Author Gloria Anzaldua writes about growing up in America as a Mexican-American and the struggles that she faced due to the language barrier. Gloria claims that she grew up around a variety of different forms of both Spanish and English, “Standard English, working class/slang English, standard Spanish, Standard Mexican Spanish, and North Mexican Spanish dialect”, are just a few. The language spoken, or combinations of the languages correlate with where the Hispanic person was originally from and where in the U.S. they are now, for example, “Chicano Spanish” is spoken in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Another focus of this article is how Gloria would be punished in school for speaking in her native tongue and then at home by her for not speaking English properly. Gloria also felt the university she attended made the Hispanics take two speech classes, “in order to get rid of our accents”, she claims.
In Julia Alvarez’s bildungsroman novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, the concept of American assimilation is vigorously examined. The story highlights the experiences of an immigrant family, who move to the United States. Sofia, the youngest of four daughters finds it extremely challenging to balance out “fitting in” in an american setting, and meeting the expectations of her strict dominican parents. Sofia consistently finds herself struggling to not stick out of a crowd, while still upholding the virtues her parents have instilled her. The difficulties encountered by Sofia are due to her parents putting tremendous amounts of pressure onto her shoulders.
(This guilt defied logic.) I felt that the intimate bond that had once held the family close” (336). As he drew closer towards being Americanized, he realized that the feeling of closeness at home was decreasing. Rodriguez lost his identity because of the teachers who taught that Spanish was an inappropriate language and that he needed to speak a public
Rodriguez’s viewpoint in “Aria” and Thiong’o’s ideas are similar in a way that they both agree with the fact that having non-native English speaker to learn English by abandoning their mother language will hinder their close relationship with their culture and family. However, Rodriguez believes that the most effective way for immigrants to learn English is to totally leave their mother language behind because this allows the immigrants to learn English in the fastest way, and the immigrants will have the confidence to fit into the American society when their English is fluent. However, Thiong’o sees more cons than pros regard to the idea of letting non-native speaker to learn a second language in a forceful and extreme way. First, he states
This shows us that the language barrier can not only have an effect on the immigrant themselves but also their children. Furthermore there are situations where the immigrants affect the country both positively and
Inside their homes, mostly the top three languages other than English that are spoken are Spanish, Vietnamese, and Urdu. These statistics show that America is made up of many different people and that English doesn’t come very easy for everyone. In many households, growing up English isn’t the first language so when it’s time for school, children struggle with literacy. Most college students nowadays have done a test and realized that the average American college graduates English literacy has declined. The National Assessment of Literacy was given and the test found low English in Hispanic culture.
To prevent the language barrier Jason’s father encouraged a bilingual immersion
The articles “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldua and “Speaking to My Fathers Dead Dialect” by Joseph Luzzi both are about immigrants who immigrate to The United States for better life prospects and being faced various difficulties such as cultural imperialism, language, low self-esteem and identity construction. On analyzing the life of immigrants, it is primarily essential to indicate that socio-cultural and economic problems depend on their hopes to be integrated in new community. Integration process is somehow difficult because of native’s attitude toward immigrants is dissimilar. Along with socio-cultural and economic problems, the key one is language discriminations because immigrants have poor language skills so that makes