Essay paper on Public and Private Language-| Article writing
1. Submit a Thesis-Topic Sentence outline for the essay topic below. Include an MLA citation for each supporting point you plan to develop in the essay.
2. Essay Topic
We take language for granted, but the ability to communicate is one of the unique traits of humans. It can be a force for good or evil. Language allows us to have close interpersonal connections with other people. It can be beautiful and inspirational. Language can turn ugly, however: it can drive wedges between people, it can break one’s heart, and it can bring down a promising career. Write an essay about the power of language, beginning with references to at least two of the resources assigned in the attached document. Inform your ideas with researched information from at least three reliable secondary sources that show how language is used to shape people or events in our world. Your essay should be 1100 – 1300 words (double-spaced, 12 point Times New Roman font), and submitted in MLA format.
Note:-
MLA Documentation Requirements:
You must cite two of the resources attached in this assignment and include researched information from at least three reliable secondary sources. Use in-text citations and include all of your sources (a total minimum of 5) in a Work Cited list at the end of the essay. Use MLA format for all documentation.
Photo of writer, lecturer, and editor Richard Rodriguez.
Richard Rodriguez, the son of Spanish-speaking Mexican American parents, was born in 1944 and grew up in San Francisco, where he currently lives. He earned a BA at Stanford University and graduate degrees in English from Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley. A writer, lecturer, and editor for the Pacific News Service, Rodriguez has served as a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and the Sunday Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times. He also regularly contributes to PBS’s NewsHour. His books, which often draw on autobiography to explore race and ethnicity in American society, include Hunger of Memory (1982), from which the following selection is drawn; Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992); and Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002). In “Public and Private Language,” he recounts the origin of his complex views of bilingual education.
AS YOU READ: Discover the ways in which learning English changed Rodriguez’s life and his relationship with his family.
Supporters of bilingual education today imply that students like me miss a great deal by not being taught in their family’s language. What they seem not to recognize is that, as a socially disadvantaged child, I considered Spanish to be a private language. What I needed to learn in school was that I had the right — and the obligation — to speak the public language of los gringos.° The odd truth is that my first-grade classmates could have become bilingual, in the conventional sense of that word, more easily than I. Had they been taught (as upper-middle-class children are often taught early) a second language like Spanish or French, they could have regarded it simply as that: another public language. In my case such bilingualism could not have been so quickly achieved. What I did not believe was that I could speak a single public language.
los gringos: Spanish for “foreigners,” often used as a derogatory term for English-speaking Americans.
Without question, it would have pleased me to hear my teachers address me in Spanish when I entered the classroom. I would have felt much less afraid. I would have trusted them and responded with ease. But I would have delayed — for how long postponed? — having to learn the language of public society. I would have evaded — and for how long could I have afforded to delay? — learning the great lesson of school, that I had a public identity.
Fortunately, my teachers were unsentimental about their responsibility. What they understood was that I needed to speak a public language. So their voices would search me out, asking me questions. Each time I’d hear them, I’d look up in surprise to see a nun’s face frowning at me. I’d mumble, not really meaning to answer. The nun would persist, “Richard, stand up. Don’t look at the floor. Speak up. Speak to the entire class, not just to me!” but I couldn’t believe that the English language was mine to use. (In part, I did not want to believe it.) I continued to mumble. I resisted the teacher’s demands. (Did I somehow suspect that once I learned public language my pleasing family life would be changed?) Silent, waiting for the bell to sound, I remained dazed, diffident,° afraid.
Because I wrongly imagined that English was intrinsically° a public language and Spanish an intrinsically private one, I easily noticed the difference between classroom language and the language of home. At school, words were directed to a general audience of listeners. (“Boys and girls.”) Words were meaningfully ordered. And the point was not self-expression alone but to make oneself understood by many others. The teacher quizzed: “Boys and girls, why do we use that word in this sentence? Could we think of a better word to use there? Would the sentence change its meaning if the words were differently arranged? And wasn’t there a better way of saying much the same thing?” (I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t try to say.)
Three months. Five. Half a year passed. Unsmiling, ever watchful, my teachers noted my silence. They began to connect my behavior with the difficult progress my older sister and brother were making. Until one Saturday morning three nuns arrived at the house to talk to our parents. Stiffly, they sat on the blue living room sofa. From the doorway of another room, spying the visitors, I noted the incongruity° — the clash of two worlds, the faces and voices of school intruding upon the familiar setting of home. I overheard one voice gently wondering, “Do your children speak only Spanish at home, Mrs. Rodriguez?” While another voice added, “That Richard especially seems so timid and shy.”
That Rich-heard!
With great tact the visitors continued, “Is it possible for you and your husband to encourage your children to practice their English when they are home?” Of course, my parents complied. What would they not do for their children’s well-being? And how could they have questioned the Church’s authority which those women represented? In an instant, they agreed to give up the language (the sounds) that had revealed and accentuated our family’s closeness. The moment after the visitors left, the change was observed. “Ahora,° speak to us en inglés,”° my father and mother united to tell us.
diffident: Shy. intrinsically: Essentially; inherently. incongruity: Lack of harmony or appropriateness.
At first, it seemed a kind of game. After dinner each night, the family gathered to practice “our” English. (It was still then inglés, a language foreign to us, so we felt drawn as strangers to it.) Laughing, we would try to define words we could not pronounce. We played with strange English sounds, often overanglicizing our pronunciations. And we filled the smiling gaps of our sentences with familiar Spanish sounds. But that was cheating, somebody shouted. Everyone laughed. In school, meanwhile, like my brother and sister, I was required to attend a daily tutoring session. I needed a full year of special attention. I also needed my teachers to keep my attention from straying in class by calling out, Richeard— their English voices slowly prying loose my ties to my other name, its three notes, Ri-car-do. Most of all I needed to hear my mother and father speak to me in a moment of seriousness in broken — suddenly heartbreaking — English. The scene was inevitable: one Saturday morning I entered the kitchen where my parents were talking in Spanish. I did not realize that they were talking in Spanish however until, at the moment they saw me, I heard their voices change to speak English. Those gringo sounds they uttered startled me. Pushed me away. In that moment of trivial misunderstanding and profound insight, I felt my throat twisted by unsounded grief. I turned quickly and left the room. But I had no place to escape to with Spanish. (The spell was broken.) My brother and sisters were speaking English in another part of the house.
Again and again in the days following, increasingly angry, I was obliged to hear my mother and father: “Speak to us en inglés.” (Speak.) Only then did I determine to learn classroom English. Weeks after, it happened: one day in school I had my hand raised to volunteer an answer. I spoke out in a loud voice. And I did not think it remarkable when the entire class understood. That day, I moved very far from the disadvantaged child I had been only days earlier. The belief, that calming assurance that I belonged in public, had at last taken hold.
Shortly after, I stopped hearing the high and loud sounds of los gringos. A more and more confident speaker of English, I didn’t trouble to listen to how strangers sounded, speaking to me. And there simply were too many English-speaking people in my day for me to hear American accents anymore. Conversations quickened. Listening to persons whose voices sounded eccentrically pitched, I usually noted their sounds for an initial few seconds before I concentrated on what they were saying. Conversations became content-full. Transparent. Hearing someone’s tone of voice — angry or questioning or sarcastic or happy or sad — I didn’t distinguish it from the words it.
