How To Write A Reflective Essay On My Cultural Heritage

I remember being brought up in a heartland housing estate in Clementi, somewhere along Old West Coast Road. The advent of different races, cultures and ethnicities in the neighbourhood contributed to my childhood experience, increasing my respect, awareness and acceptance for other individuals’ differences and cultural traits. Being brought up in a Malay Family, my parents are competent in the Malay Language, coined as the ‘Bahasa Melayu’. Drawing on my cultural roots, my family is of a Malaccan-Malaysia Descendent. Both paternal and maternal migrated to Singapore in the early 1960s, bringing in the distinctive traits of the Malaccan language. Dominance of the Malaccan culture and ethnicity was apparent in the Malay-Speaking environment that I was in - from food,

The Malaccan language differs in terms of pronunciation, word meaning and there is a variation of closed and open classes that makes up its own defined part of speech. Subliminally, I picked up the dialect and applied it across to communicate with my family members and relatives. Moreover, my late paternal grandmother was able to converse in different languages such as Tamil, Bahasa Indonesia and Hokkien, a Singaporean Chinese Dialect. At such a young age, I had access to the ‘Kampung (Village) Spirit,’ whereby my language learning were underpinned by daily conversations and speech acts made by my late grandmother with neighbours who spoke in different languages. On the other hand, despite the rich language awareness, I was only able to converse in basic Malaccan Dialect. Notably, there was minimal to absence of the English Language in my earlier childhood development.

My English learning experience happened in 1995 where I began my kindergarten education. Gradually, there was an implicit separation from the Malaccan Dialect because of my parent’s progressive upbringing of exposing