Phase 1: Literacy Narrative

Abstract: This narrative focuses on one of my many encounters with the struggle of the English Language. In my Literacy Narrative I decided to focus on my difficulty to learn the English Language as I only knew how to speak my native language Spanish till the age of four. Throughout this essay I express how hard it was for me to be able to pass the English test that was given to every student going into elementary school to see if they would be put in an ESL class or not. As I accomplished to learn a new language I realized how fortunate I am to be bilingual and that it won’t always be easy to accomplish a goal.

Esta Soy Yo! This is Me!

           You may not know but my native language is Spanish, and I only spoke Spanish until the age of four and a half and around that time I only learned the basics of English like how to say please, thank you, good morning, my name and my age. Most of my speaking encounters with people at that time were all in Spanish until the moment I had to prepare myself to start elementary school and I had to take an English assessment to be enrolled into a class. That’s when I learned a few new English words with the help of my older brother.

I remember sitting down in the cold bright office in front of this thirty-year-old man who was the proctor for the disastrous English assessment I was about to take. This man did not hesitate to start right away with introducing what the test would be composed of but all I got from what he was saying was “ESL class or normal class.” At that point I felt like I was burning up inside, my hands were sweating, no eye contact was made, and you could hear my heart racing from how nervous I was. I just knew I was going to fail, I mean, how wasn’t I going to fail if from every phrase he spoke, I could only understand a single word. The proctor continued by saying “Let’s begin. What’s your name and how old are you?” I responded with “Christine Sanchez and I’m four.” He said, “good job.” I felt a bit of relief because at least I understood that part. But from that point forward everything went downhill and all I heard was him rambling. I felt so ashamed. I felt completely attacked because I didn’t speak, read or write English. It just wasn’t the language I knew. When he realized I wasn’t going to respond he decided to move on to the reading portion where he had me read the different words that were cut up into pieces. I was capable of reading some of them like the, and, him, she but some of them, I had never seen before. However, I felt as if I hadn’t done as bad as the first section. Nevertheless, when he moved on the writing section he was saying full phrases that he wanted me to write, I recall that for the first phrase that he said I tried to write what I thought I heard based off the sounds he would make. As he moved on to more phrases I just blanked out as if I couldn’t focus anymore, as if all I could hear was the noise the AC and the coffee machine were making.

When little progress was made, the proctor sipped on his black coffee while just laying back on his chair and decided to say “Ok, the test is done.” I got up immediately, opened the heavy metal door and ran off to my mom. I didn’t know what to feel since I knew I flunked the test and I didn’t pass a single part of the assessment. To say the least, he walked out right behind me and said, “Ms. Sanchez your daughter had a very hard time understanding what I was saying, therefore she will be put in an ESL class.” My mom wasn’t in shock at all. Her facial expression didn’t change one bit. As we walked out of the building, all my mom said was “todo está bien, no te preocupes porque en esa clase aprenderás inglés bien y no serás la única que no sabe inglés, nada mas este bien enfocada en lo que le enseñe.” As I took my mom’s advice into great consideration I focused throughout the whole school year and prepared myself to retake the English assessment.

For me personally, I came to realize that when we aren’t in school or work we speak in the language we are most comfortable with expressing ourselves. From this experience of learning a new language at the age of four I understood that it is acceptable to be different, that we should be able to communicate in the way we feel more with and not feel as if we won’t be accepted by society. I’ve acknowledged that a language doesn’t define the intelligence of a person in any way, shape or form. Being put in ESL and seeing how many of us were in that class for not knowing English made me identify that we were all being raised in different cultures and how unique we were from one another. For me personally having to go back and forth between English and Spanish when I was four was stressful, but it also helped me differentiate between the two languages and with which group of people I would be speaking a certain language with. Not being able to pass my first test in a language made me realize that it didn’t make me illiterate, it just meant I had to learn the language the same way I had already learned Spanish.

The major significance of this event is that commitment to learning is key and that you shouldn’t have a negative attitude when you fail because you could just try again when you prepare for it. I also learned that there isn’t anything wrong with English not being your native language and that you shouldn’t feel embarrassed for that but feel proud of your roots and where you came from. To not know English when I was four made me feel illiterate in school but as I got older, I appreciated how much of an advantage I had. It made me understand that being bilingual is more beneficial than just knowing English since I would be able to communicate with more people and for jobs it is a greater opportunity to know more than one language. Being able to speak more than one language and practicing it on a daily helps every individual like myself be more successful in not forgetting the languages you learned and becoming more fluent in the multiple languages. Now that I’ve passed the struggle of learning the English language I have learned how I could use both Spanish and English when I communicate with people in case that they need help with translation, or in case I don’t know how to say something in one language I have the other language that I could say it in.

Reflection

Throughout phase 1 of this course I’ve learned how to make writings more appealing to the audience, how to make the work credible, and how to present the facts and statistics in once writing. Basically, I learned how to incorporate the use of Aristotle’s triangle into my free writes, my one-page snapshot as well as my literacy narrative. Through the different text that we have read in class it has given me a great guide into writing my narrative and what I could do to improve my piece. As I read the articles, texts, essays, stories, I definitely picked up on how the author’s would use pathos to catch the audience attention and connection to the topic, how they would give us a bit of background information on them/the topic that would help make their piece more credible, and how some would go in depth of studies done in order to prove their point. These guides have helped understand how a writer can often use these same techniques to make their own piece of work a thousand times better.

The concepts that most impacted me in this phase were as stated above–the use of rhetorical situation that helped the authors connect to their audience. I also believe the term purpose and evidence have had a big impact on me because for someone to write a narrative in this case and pick a specific story you must have a reason behind why you picked that specific story to represent you or a big impact that has affected/changed your life. Then the evidence term has also influenced my understanding as well because once you state the purpose clearly on why your writing something you must basically back it up and present how it affected you. You use evidence to support the thesis of the literacy narrative.

This phase’s assignment in writing my literacy narrative as well in class has helped me “achieve explore and analyze in their own and other’s writing a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.” Specifically, when we read the different readings in the course packet and as a class we identified the different techniques the author’s used to get their purpose across. Another goal achieved was “recognize the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and be open to communicating across different languages and cultures” this was achieved through reading the text in the FIQWS packet it helped me learn how I wasn’t the only one who spoke English in a different way as others.

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