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Cross cultural experience ideas
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Reflection on improving English
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Happy Little Accidents
I never intended to go to Belize.
Bob Ross, the famous painter, used to say that there are no mistakes, only “happy little accidents.” Whenever he would make a stroke he did not intend, he would find a way to use that stroke to make the painting better; transforming a stray line into a tree’s trunk, or morphing a misplaced color into a bird in flight. As I would watch The Joy of Painting endlessly on TV, I thought about the skill of men like Mr. Ross at making the best of his situation, and turning his “mistakes” around to make the whole work of art turn out better.
None of this occurred to me when in January of 2015, I was informed that the list upon which I had hastily scrawled my signature a few weeks prior, was not a sign-up sheet for the Providence Church band at all, but for a month-long mission teaching children in the Central American nation of Belize. This was not a happy little accident. This was a mistake, and a monumental one at that. Now not only did I lose an audition opportunity I had been waiting months for, now I had to spend a month in the middle of nowhere, working with children who do not even speak English? Naturally, I informed them of my mistake and requested that I be removed from the team. I was informed right back that if any one person left, we would fall below the required number of team members and the trip would not run. Belize was no longer a mission trip; it was a guilt trip, and I had just been handed a non-transferrable first class ticket to a month of work.
Fast forward to late April. I had had four months to think about the trip and my role in it. I had determined that a free opportunity to see a different country did not present itself every day, so I might as well tr...
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... to learn that contrary to what we had been told, the entire town spoke almost exclusively Spanish, and the only people that spoke any English at all were the children who had taken classes at the school over the past two years. We quickly discovered that the language barrier was more like a language brick wall, and we quickly realized that almost all of our English lessons were much too advanced for us to teach with any sort of effectiveness.
The team began a daily routine of staying up long into the night, working by lantern light to revise the next day’s lesson plan so that the students could understand it. As long as we were here, even if we could not teach any of our prepared material, we might as well try and teach the children something. Ironically, our team of instructors probably learned more Spanish during our month there than the children learned English.
Jimmy Baca’s story “Coming into Language” describes his emotional childhood and what he went through while in prison. At seventeen Baca still didn’t know how to read or write. Throughout the story, he shares his struggle with language and how prison eventually brought himself to learn how to read and write. Jimmy Baca then uses examples in his story explaining how he admired language and used it to free himself from the cruel world he grew up in.
It was back in the summer of 2004 when all was calm. The trees filled w/ dry green leaves, the grass barely green as patches of yellowness overcame its dried burned look, dandelions arose in monstrous amounts as the white cotton-like blooms of a dandelion flutter in the midst of an arid breeze, and visions of heat waves could clearly be noticed along a paved street on a clear afternoon. Yep, this truly was mid summer. But I do prefer summer over winter any day of the year. Around the hottest time of the year, a.k.a. middle of July, my church travels on a mission trip over to the Appalachia Mountains to help people in poverty rebuild their homes. I, among 14 other youths and leaders enjoy this yearly mission trip. Only to leave one week after my birthday the ASP (Appalachia Service Project) crew fled the town of Glen Ellyn and headed east towards the mountainous Appalachia Mountains. The mission had not only been to help people in distress but to also give an insight on personal faith, life, love, friendship, and a better understanding on why we are really here and why we have chosen to come here, as certain personality traits that we possess are revealed throughout the trip. I do remember last year's trip very clearly, and we've had just a few major dilemmas, but this year just clearly out does last year in every way, shape and form.
As a young child, Rodriguez finds comfort and safety in his noisy home full of Spanish sounds. Spanish, is his family's' intimate language that comforts Rodriguez by surrounding him in a web built by the family love and security which is conveyed using the Spanish language. "I recognize you as someone close, like no one outside. You belong with us, in the family, Ricardo.? When the nuns came to the Rodriquez?s house one Saturday morning, the nuns informed the parents that it would be best if they spoke English. Torn with a new since of confusion, his home is turned upside down. His sacred family language, now banished from the home, transforms his web into isolation from his parents. "There was a new silence in the home.? Rodriguez is resentful that it is quiet at the dinner table, or that he can't communicate with his parents about his day as clearly as before. He is heartbroken when he overhears his mother and father speaking Spanish together but suddenly stop when they see Rodriguez. Thi...
Richard Rodriguez commences, “ Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” recounting the memory of his first day of school. A memory that will help support against the use of “family language” as the child 's primary language at school. Rodriguez is forced to say no: it 's not possible for children to use the family language at school. To support against the “family language” used at school, Rodriguez uses simple and complex sentences to help achieve the readers to understand that to only accept the family language is to be closed off by society; to not have a “public life” is to not share one 's life experiences with society. Bilingual Educators state that you would “lose a degree of ‘individuality’ if one assimilates. Rodriguez refutes this statement through his expressive use of diction and narration educing emotion from his audience building his pathos. Rodriguez also develops ethos due to the experiences he went
Throughout Richards early childhood development he quickly understood that in order to succeed in America he would have to learn to confidently speak in English. Richard is Hispanic American and although he was born in America, Spanish was the only language that he was exposed to as a young child. He grew up in a home where Spanish flowed freely, but he soon realized outside of his home the language that he primarily knew was foreign. His parents spoke fluent Spanish along with all of his relatives. The brief encounters he experienced of his parents speaking English were only in public places and the proficiency was very poor. Rodriguez’s home was as a safety net for him and his Spanish speaking family with they are his only real connections to the outside world. It wasn’t until Richards encounter with his teachers that he and his family was heavily impressed on the importance of developing a public language. After the encouragement of the visit home from a teacher as a family
Even from an early age, Rodriguez is a successful student. Everyone is extremely proud of Rodriguez for earning awards and graduating to each subsequent level of his education. But all his success was not necessarily positive. In fact, we see that his education experience is a fairly negative one. One negative that Rodriguez endures is his solitude. Education compels him to distance himself from his family and heritage. According to Richard Hoggart, a British education theorist, this is a very natural process for a scholarship boy. Hoggart explains that the ?home and classroom are at cultural extremes,? (46). There is especially an opposition in Rodriguez?s home because his parents are poorly educated Mexicans. His home is filled with Spanish vernacular and English filled with many grammatical errors. Also, the home is filled with emotions and impetuosity, whereas the classroom lacks emotion and the teachers accentuate rational thinking and reflectiveness.
When they first arrived to the United States their only hopes were that they would have a better life and that there were better special education programs for Maribel to attend at Evers. Alma imagined that the buildings would look a lot nicer than they really were. The family was surprised that they could take things from the street that someone threw out of their house, but were in working condition. When they arrived they didn’t think that you would actually have to learn English to be able to communicate, but after going to stores and interacting with people they learned that they need to learn English if they want to live in America. They hoped that you could be able to afford anything in America by working, but based off of the money Arturo was making they learned that you can’t buy everyth...
Even though Diaz chose English as his medium of expression, he never aspired to create a failed Spanglish, but an English exceptionally creative, capable of assimilating the Spanish spoken in New York and using it to improve their adoptive language. None of its relators fascinates with this new language, or becomes the main topic of the novel, but rather it is used as a fun vehicle that allows him to expose his stories with admirable freedom.
...he gets them confused with the Spanish alphabet. Then we would go around the apartment getting familiar with everything and its' name. At first I was just tutoring Jesica, but then slowly members of her family where adding to the study group and soon everybody was trying to learn English. I didn't care because it was fun and I like the feeling of helping all of them learn something. Not only was I helping them, they begin to start helping me learn Spanish as well. It was sort of like I tell you and you tell me. They were always laughing at me because I spoke Spanish horribly and they thought that my accent was funny. It was funny to me that I know basically no Spanish and they knew no English but we were still able to communicate. That is an experience that I will never forget and I plan on tutoring them and they tutor me until I graduate college in May 2006.
...roughout his autobiography, Rodriguez illustrates the problematic conditions revolving around bilingual education programs and affirmative action, pointing out that both policies tend to negate their intentions. Rodriguez scathingly criticizes both programs correctly identifying the first as an obstacle to what he sees as the keys to success in America--a solid education and learning to speak and write English well--and the second as promoting socially crippling labels--"disadvantaged minority." Through countless arguments that a bilingual program hinders English and non-English students' education and that affirmative action accommodates only "privileged" minority students rather than the students most in need, Rodriguez's life story, Hunger of Memory, serves as a political publication meant to raise concern for the function of government in the education system.
In the beginning of the article, Richard started out by mentioning how his public language which is Spanish will not get him nowhere in life, however by learning a public language which is English will help more in life and make stuff way easier for him. He mentioned being scared and hard for him to learn a public society language. When I came to America 11 years ago, it was hard for me to learn a second language and I doubted myself all the time, however I had family members, teachers and friends pushing me to learn and telling me to not give up even
“It’s difficult to recall the first time I went to Switzerland. The actual experience of flying across the ocean at a young age felt like journeying to a different world. That eleven-hour flight was such a tedious part of the very exciting journey ahead. I remember once looking out the window of the plane as we touched down and feeling such a deep comfort and contentment. I felt as though I was home. What awaited me were days of family and friends, hiking and exploring, and delicious food. It was always such a beautiful experience being i...
My parents decided to immigrate to the United States when I was six years of age. As we established ourselves in the United States, my first language was only Spanish. Spanish was the language that I was taught at home, and it was the only language to be spoken at home. Rodriguez describes when he first entered his classroom where he was introduced to a formal English-speaking context, writing that, ?I remember to start with that day in Sacramento-a California now nearly thirty years past-when I first entered a classroom, able to understa...
...s all she says pointing at the idea that English teachers have the power to remove the unwillingness and resistance from their Puerto Rican students by being models of successful avid English language learners and users themselves. This is done by inspiring a proud feeling to their students for their first language, Spanish, and promoting the use of this language first so that they can appreciate and better learn a second not because of a hidden political agenda, but because it would add more to their overall knowledge. This is a great way to see English, not in the political sense but in a broader enriching and fun way that can expand further more outside of what is Spanish and add a feeling of self fulfillment given the idea that the individual is more prepared to communicate to an even bigger amount of other human beings.
This situation was no longer allowed. While over ten percent of the total adolescent education systems contain emergent bilinguals, a whopping sixty percent of those students are educated in only English (Bale). Maria Estela Brisk, a Boston College Education professor, believes, “schools have wasted much energy in the search for a "perfect" model and the best way to learn English” when they could just focus on providing “quality education” to every student in the system (1). Teachers’ main priority should consist of effectively teaching their students to prepare them for the future, but currently there is a lack of certified bilingual education teachers.