My progress In

Language Politics

 

Going into my English composition class I was thinking it would be like any ordinary English class. A  class where we will work on improving our skills in writing, reading, grammar and other basic things we would do in any ordinary English class. I also thought that we would have to read a book that I will most likely not find interesting and write pages on it. My assumption was wrong and I was introduced to a  various of topics which I have heard little to nothing about. The semester was split into 4 different phases. In the first phase we studied texts in which we would practice rhetorical reading, which was something I never heard about, analyzing, and writing a narrative. In the second phase we went more into depth of rhetorical strategies and even created our own texts using any rhetorical strategy to target our specific audience. In the third phase we learned various of skills in order to write a good research paper about any language politic of our choosing

Our semester began by reading and watching speeches about non-standards forms of English. Out of all the texts and videos we analyze I really liked two of the videos shown to us. The first being a  speech from Jamila Lyiscott called “3 ways to speak English”. I really like this video because of the way Jamila delivered her speech which was made to seem like it’s her own way of speaking English. She made her speech sound almost as if she was rapping it and she talked about the three ways she spoke English as well as the past and present-day identity of language. The other video was a speech from Safwat Saleem called “Why I keep speaking up, even when people mock my accent.” I like this speech because he shows the audience the issue he and many people are facing and how he managed to cope with it as well as trying to motivate others. Overall all the text and videos really helped me get a better understanding of the issues on non-standard English. Also at the end of phase 1 we wrote literacy narrative and I wrote about my attitude towards writing. I really liked writing my narrative because I never talked about my attitude and it was an effective way to reflect on myself.

In phase two we got more into depth of rhetorical analysis where we investigate what the texts “do.” We analyzed to get a better understanding in what was the authors purpose by looking more into their claim, context, evidence, argument, target audience, etc. The purpose for us analyzing texts was so that we can have practice in order to write our own rhetorical text. I was unsure of what to write about until I came across a BuzzFeed video that was about parents who speak broken English. Since it was on the topic of language politics I decided to watch it and maybe it’ll inspire an idea. I found that video to be very relatable and it was something that I would be interested in writing about so I did. I wrote an argument on how the discrimination against parents who speak broken English must stop. The video was interviewing adults to share their experiences of having non English speaking parents. I used some of the interviewees stories to help me build an argument to show the audience just a fraction of what people go through. I even used a few stories of my own in order to connect with my audience.

In phase three I wrote my first ever research paper. We learned how to locate and evaluating sources, make strong thesis statements, citing in MLA format, etc. I learned how to make better use of  evidence as well as paraphrasing authors points to strengthen my own points. We could write about any topic we wanted in the language politics category. I chose to write about language ideology and on how code-switching  and discrimination are connected. Language ideology simply put is how people talk based on their surroundings, so I connected code switching to how people may talk differently with different people similar to Jamila Lyiscott. I always found code-switching interesting but I never really looked deep into it but now I have wrote an whole essay on it. And again I used personal points to connect with my target audience and to further strengthen my points.

Overall, I have seen a lot of growth in me as a writer and reader. In my literacy narrative I wrote about how I hated writing to somewhat liking it but now I feel like I’m liking writing even more. I found myself  being personal in my writings which was something I don’t think I even did in high school. Now that I’m thinking about it I probably didn’t like writing because I suck at it but every time I improved my skills I started liking writing more. But back to the topic I learned a lot of valuable skills throughout the semester which I was not expecting at all to learn. I got a better understanding in analyzing texts, reading, writing various texts and I learned how important targeting an audience is. I never wrote with an audience in mind I just wrote to get over my assignments but having one in mind definitely helps me write better.