September 9,2019
Personal Narrative
In my experiences with literacy and language I haven’t had a bad experience but I have had and experience at a really young age where I was confused as to why People where acting so judgmental. When I first went to elementary school I was placed with a group of people where they had to read and talk to understand more English.
I was confused as to why I was placed here because I felt like I knew the language, I felt right talking, and I also felt confident, so I didn’t really think anything about it. I remember this one time when I moved to a new middle school I started two days after the first day of school and I went in and every kid looked at me. My parents are immigrants and so I obviously look Mexican and people sometimes assume that I don’t speak English and to be honest I don’t understand why. The teacher told me to come in and she led me to a table where she had separated a Muslim girl and I was slightly confused because she looked pretty normal and English speaking to me. However, once I sat down the teacher asked me if I wanted some flash cards and I was confused and I looked to the girl and she had flash cards because she didn’t speak English and I told the teacher I was like “oh no I speak English” and she just looked at me and said “oh okay”. I felt as if I was being discriminated just because of my appearance and the assuming of me not speaking English made it worse.
I believe that schools shouldn’t separate ESL students from regular English language because I believe that the development of a language can be influenced by the people surrounding the kids. If a child doesn’t speak English, he or she can learn how to develop English just because they are around it more. I also remember this time in 4th grade I was new and it was a bilingual class, I walked in the classroom slightly nervous and looked around and most of the faces I saw where Hispanic faces. The teacher sat me down with a group and the kids around me continued doing the work they were doing but as soon as I sat down they looked at me with a questioning look.
One of the kids asked me if I spoke English, and I responded with a yes because I did and they were slightly surprised and they told me they didn’t think I spoke English and this leads me to the following questions, questions that we all may ask ourselves, why? Why are teachers and schools so judgmental as to where u should learn and how u should learn? Why judge a student based on how she or he looks like culturally? Why separate ESL/ELL students from “normal English” speakers? And I want to question the idea of the development of the English language in schools and how it is being affected with the separation of both individual groups.
Looking at the other side of the spectrum we can acknowledge the fact that the schools are doing this for a reason. Schools have policies, rules and guidelines that staff are supposed to follow. Educational institutions may believe that it is more effective to make students learn like this. They may be convinced that separating two different speaking groups may advance the lessons instead of delaying the learning process of other children. There are many websites that explain the difference of ESL/ELL classrooms and regular classrooms. “An ESL is different because t often includes students who speak a variety of languages…. They will also have different standards for a student’s evaluation as they progress.
The goal for all of them is to help students learn English as quickly as possible so they can join their peers in a regular classroom”. We can conclude that the purpose for this is to make the child learn faster and join the “regular” classrooms faster as if they students weren’t normal. I can challenge the idea as to why this isn’t the correct method to learn English. As I said previously my whole ordeal with this situation is that students don’t always learn this way, sometimes students may learn faster if the words around them stick to the way they talk. As I was growing up the language or the mother tongue I always had around was Spanish and so it was always there on my mind. So in a way this is similar to Spanish speaking students. The more they tend to stick with a language the faster the student is going to learn English.
The percentage of ELL students is 9.6 percent and how many percentages of these students end up dropping out of school? Only 63 percent of ELL students graduate from high school, giving 37 percent of dropouts. We can imagine as human beings with logical explanation that if these students where to learn in a “regular” classroom they would have higher chances of success and apprentice.
All these emotions, logical ness, and statistics that I have provided don’t mean anything unless we change the point of view we have and we start accepting others for who they are, for what their language stands for, for who we all are, and the big impact language has on our identity.
