Language Transition as an Immigrant
We were more concerned with writing in this course than with literature. We began to comprehend the underlying story behind English composition, where we focused our attention on languages. At the beginning of the course, I focused on the politics of language. It makes me believe that there is more to languages than we can observe from various recognized perspectives. This deeper thought stemmed from writing about the politics of language and the difficulties that surround accents, speech, and literacy. Along with learning everything, we used the course learning outcomes to connect with ourselves through the languages.
The learning objective of developing strategies while workshopping is one such example that essentially changed my way of writing and editing with peers. In so doing this, there was a sense of getting the best out of the best work done to turn in the final draft. When we were in glass and worked with groups, we had the chance to reflect on others’ writing and help them enhance it. The strategies developed in doing this revision workshop played a crucial part in the final turned-in essay. In phase 3, we see that with the research paper, the class made a circle to critique and add suggestions to people’s thesis statements, and you get multiple comments on ways to improve a thesis statement. The issue with my thesis statement was that it was very long and there were ways I could dense down the wording recommended by the professor. This was an effective way of student learning by developing various methods to revise/edit/collaborate on the essay where in this scenario with the circle, we made a huge collaboration of the class as a unique way for one to receive edit suggestions.
The reason for resonation with oneself comes especially from the learning objective, “Examine how attitudes towards linguistic standards empower and oppress language users.” This objective fits the problems in society with immigrants. As an immigrant, I was naturally affected by English oppression within the United States. In Phase 1, we discussed and shared with the class the politics of language with how different people deal with empowerment over linguistic standards. With this, we have written a language and literacy narrative alongside multi-media sources to communicate the outcomes and journey leading up to it. In my written narrative, I explained the issues I had to deal with when I arrived in America and how there was an instance of bullying when I was in a nearly all-white school, “classmates from kindergarten to 1st grade having said that my English is ‘stupid’” (Ray). This got to my head really and in general, you realize that society can throw a curveball at you in the scenario of languages. Another part was discussing these issues with peers and seeing their spoken narrative (presentation) learning about their immigrant conflicts with the language barrier. One example spoken, “I started to work on my English. It would often just suck straight off…” (Ray). Here I describe the enthusiasm I had to work on my English to prove the “nuisances” wrong with me accepting how bad it was. I certainly was intrigued and engaged with the questions about others’ pasts and realized it was not just me that had to witness all the language oppression prevail. In other words, it brought out an empathetic me when I hear about my classes’ journeys.
Furthermore, revisions and linguistic standards impacting oppression were not the only course learning objective that enhanced my writing, but in so which we analyzed rhetorical texts, and recognized key rhetorical terms engaging in writing situations. For example, we looked at many rhetorical readings and videos, but I chose Amy Tan’s article, “Mother Tongue”. Through this article, we have a grasp and comprehension of the rhetorical situations the author communicates to the audience. Most of her essays consisted of the rhetorical strategy of Ethos and Pathos. Tan has an anecdote in which she is going to her CAT Scan appointment her mother had and since her mother has broken English, she wasn’t able to communicate properly with the medical facility there. It states in the article, “Mother’s Tongue”, “Still, she said, the hospital did not apologize when they said they had lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy…” (Amy Tan Page 2). At the hospital after losing her CAT Scan, the medical facility did not give an apology on their behalf but due to her broken English, made matters worse and Tan had to step in to get rid of the hot atmosphere. Overall, the broken English from Tan’s mother had given them a huge obstacle in America that brought injustice within the politics of language. With all these unfortunate circumstances that are rhetorical situations, we get a sense of Ethos and Pathos in it. Ethos shows Tan’s credibility in her background as an immigrant with her mother who had broken English; the rhetorical situation described earlier had the audience feeling empathetic. We analyzed multiple rhetorical texts like these to find ethos, pathos, and logos to show the author’s form of communication to the audience through their genre and purpose.
Speaking of rhetorical genre, we implemented that form of rhetorical situation to connect it with our own creative rhetorical genre to express those politics of language challenges faced. This was phase 2 of the course where we wrote a multimodal assignment to talk about a rhetorical text we can choose out of the ones we went over, and make one for ourselves if we were to go for an “A” for the semester. I represented Tan’s rhetorical situations with a meme titled, “Wat iz wong wit my Inglesh” (Ray). This aspect of the project was pretty cool in my eyes as it was a unique way to implement rhetorical terms mentioned before. For my part, it was a poem, titled “New Soil” (Ray). I made the poem more Pathos as it describes a plethora of struggles as an immigrant as I briefly talked about the narrator (representing me) getting bullied and reflecting based on the mirror. This was my practice in using rhetorical terms and strategies in my writing of the poem.
In addition, I created sentence structures that integrated a stance through sources, paraphrasing strategies, and summary and synthesis. This entire learning objective was part of the phase 3 task of producing the research essay. Synthesis was an important aspect of my skill development because it required me to show a connection between two sources in order to provide more solid evidence to support the argument. In one essay, I discussed Hindu racism in Bangladesh, which was reinforced by an extended synthesis in another article by a different author outlining the racism and the harm it caused to the community. We captured this synthesis through keywords connecting articles, “the article further elaborates differently through a political perspective in Pakistan…” (Ray) in which this example is added to the first article’s intended point.
In phase 3, we conducted extensive research to locate relevant references that effectively support your thesis statement in paragraphs. We learned about the CCNY library database, specifically the A-Z database, for finding scholarly sources; this is for the requirement of 2-3 scholarly sources, 1 peer-reviewed scholarly source, 2 multi-media sources, and 2-3 non-scholarly sources, with a maximum of 8 sources used to get an A in the class. In my article, I used Wikipedia sources to demonstrate the discrimination against Hindus in Bangladesh, as well as the destruction of gods. This assessed the reliability of my research work because I included not just Wikipedia, but also scholarly sources from the database where I obtained certain content from authors’ books published. We are used to obtaining sources for a research essay to write about in high school, but this college assignment went above and beyond in terms of gathering/preparing sources for the research paper. The addition of the college’s library database fine-tuned the essay that is scholarly written, which was a key feature in strengthening my abilities in research essays.
Following up on Phase 3, the learning objective of “practicing systematic applications of citation convention” further enhanced my writing. I learned about the MLA paragraph form to cite a source in the essay which was a way to introduce it. The “Purdue.owl” website was a recommended website to use to cite the sources and have it be in the MLA Format on the cited page towards the end of the research paper. I felt that this way the research paper would feel more professional when including in parenthesis the page number of the quote you cite or are referring to.
The course learning objective of using “print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences”, was unclear to me at first. We didn’t do a lot of printing but had the use of digital technologies to do the job. The WordPress site we created at the start of Phase 1 had worksheets to be answered on the rhetorical texts and we had it uploaded to our own created website. This site felt like a great addition to organizing and utilizing technology fully to write about the analysis of the rhetorical texts we read. This was widely used to reference the audience from reading the articles of authors and their issues with language. The WordPress site was an addition to create an answer to our understanding of the author’s purpose in writing what they had wanted to write and send a message. The audience addressed in these worksheets uploaded onto the WordPress website of whom the author is targeting in these rhetorical articles they write.
Cited Sources
- Tan, Amy. Mother Tongue, by Amy Tan – University of Missouri–St. Louis. https://umsl.edu/~alexanderjm/Mother%20Tongue%20by%20Tan.pdf.
- Ray, Animesh. “Written Language Literacy Narrative – English 110 Freshman Composition.” English 110 Freshman Composition – Just Another CUNY Academic Commons Site, 1 Dec. 2022, https://anirayeng110.commons.gc.cuny.edu/written-language-literacy-narrative/.
- “Blog Posts.” Edited by Animesh By Animesh Ray, English 110 Freshman Composition, https://anirayeng110.commons.gc.cuny.edu/.
