Literacy And Bilingual Analysis

In his essay about being a bilingual student, Richard Rodriguez makes the claim that a family’s language is intimate. As an intimate language it is unfit for use in school or in public and that attempts to do so demonstrate a misunderstanding of the purposes of school and the intimacy of a family’s language. To create this argument, Rodriguez recounts numerous parts of his childhood to serve as examples to support his claim. Rodriguez uses some of his examples to state that English is a public language. In one segment of his essay, he explicitly says that English is the language of society when he says “for it is now the sound that of my society,” (Rodriguez 12) his society being Americans.

There’s been a lot of controversy about online literacy and printed literacy. Both types of literacy have their upsides. Motoko Rich’s article “Literacy Debate: R U Really Reading?” reveals the controversy between online literacy and printed literacy. Despite the controversy, Rich explains how online literacy is a new way of reading.

The definition of bilingualism is fluency in or use of two languages. Martín Espada is the author of the essay “The New Bathroom Policy at English High School” which is about the act of Spanish being a forbidden language in a school full of multicultural children. In the essay, his main argument is the idea that the language of Spanish, or Bilingualism as a whole is interpreted as a burden for a young immigrant. Another author named Richard Rodriguez wrote about his struggle to juggle between his 2 languages, his public language (English) and his private

The layout shows the reader the development of literacy theories from Early Theories and Models Applicable to Reading through the 21st century. It was interesting to see some of the theories overlapping each other and some of the theories were developed upon by other scholars. For example, the Schema Theory was developed further by Louise Rosenblatt’s Transactional Theory. Background of Authors

Bilingual people often get pushed away or bullied for not being able to speak a new language. Bilingual speakers should feel like they belong in their own identity. They should also speak out about their struggles and challenges with bilingualism. In the essay, "Hunger of Memory", Richard Rodriguez explains that being able to keep his native tongue while also learning a new language can be very helpful in the outside world. Being able to acknowledge different languages can help at school, work, or even just the grocery store.

They view these practices as normal communication modes of bilinguals who make no attempt to separate languages according to their function and context. (p.

Language forms a part of culture and identity. Bilingualism is the right to speak multiple languages. Part of bilingualism is keeping and developing a passion for language. In the essay “The New Bathroom Policy at English High School,” Martín Espada suggests the definition of bilingualism and the importance of keeping it. Espada understands the difficulty of continuing to speak Spanish.

However, in order for one to truly understand the arguments made by the authors they must also understand the context behind these arguments; therefore, knowing how the individual authors’ definition of bilingualism lets the reader truly absorb what points they’re trying to make and why. In Espada’s essay, he defines bilingualism as a way for a person to remain in contact with their different cultural identities. There are many areas in the essay where the reader could interpret this definition from. However, the most significant piece of evidence appears at the beginning of the essay where Espada mentions his friend Jack Agueros’ analogy to describe his bilingualism “English and Spanish are like two dogs I love. English is an obedient dog.

My Journey to Literacy As kids we are taught literacy without knowing it. Our parents or teachers have sat down with us and helped us write out our letters, sound out words, and form sentences. We were all given crayons at restaurants and a piece of paper that had fun games, cartoons, and tic tac toe. There are few people who have not learned to read and write, or have learned in a different way or at an older age.

Literacy has applied over the course of my education and my life. As an education major, I believed that literacy was an ability to learn how to read and write. Furthermore, literacy has been a part of my education. I have come to an understanding that literacy is a lot more than what it seems. It’s about expressing yourself that includes your opinions and feelings.

There are many limitations and difficulties to attain accurate results on the differences of bilinguals and monolinguals, however, researchers and educators are positive about the benefits of being bilingual or multilingual. Hopefully new research and studies in the near future will be able to solve the questions and

1) The two types of Discourses, “saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing- believing combinations,” James Paul Gee addresses in his essay “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” are Primary Discourses and Secondary Discourses. These Discourses are “ways of being in the world; they are forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes.” Both Discourses are acquired through acculturation. Our primary Discourse is acquired in the home and peer groups.

The notion of bilingualism is frequently connected to the idea of code-switching since a person should have ability to speak using two or more than one variety. Researchers have made countless studies describing bilingualism as they create awareness in different ways. To begin with is Bloomfield (1933) who defined bilingualism as having the “native- like control of two languages”. However, Haugen (1953) pinpointed that bilingualism is the ability of a speaker to communicate and understand an additional variety. This is to mean that the concept of bilingualism exist only when an individual of a certain variety has the capability to communicate effectively in an additional variety.

To be multiliterate, a person is needed to be able to understand and function with numerous methods of communication. Multiliteracy involves being reading and writing literate and being able to understand and use technology to function and survive in the world of today. Technology is constantly changing and increasing and being multiliterate is of vital importance. I intend to discuss three important literacies in my life, being computer literate, reading and writing literate as well as health literacy. These literacies have helped me grow into the person I am today as well as gotten me as successful as I can be at my age.

This has been observed that such people have great skills of accent neutralization, syntax understanding and code switching. Drastic changes are also witness on the part of being bilingual. It has been reasoned thatbilingual people have the capacity to grasp concept easily and they have the aptitude of learning language more easily then multilingual. Cognitive flexibility is also regarded as one of the major skills of bilingualindividual. It