Abby Jackson
Mr. Montoya
English 1300
2, November 2014
Effective
Richard Rodrigues discusses the topic of Bilingualism both positively and negatively. Rodriguez does a good job of discussing bilingualism. He discusses bilingualism very effectively by using personal stories and facts, as Rodriguez himself grew up as a bilingual child. In Richard Rodriguez’s story, Aria: A Memoir if a Bilingual Childhood, he addresses the issue of bilingualism and bilingual education. He argues that it is unnecessary for a student to not be their narrative language, but inly English in school and public life. He males those argument effectively by using three main points. The first one being how it made it harder to be able to adapt into society and feel like you actually belong, second how he thought his native language was a private language only used by his family, and the third main point being how he didn’t think being different from society and being able to speak that second language was a good thing. He thought it was a negative effect in his life. Rodriguez explains these three main points about his story in an effective way that makes it easier to understand the story. For Richard Rodriguez, not using English in his home made it harder to adapt into society. Because of Rodriguez’s use of his parent’s native language (Spanish) at home, it made it harder for him to grow into society and also slowed down his social growth in school and academic growth in school as well. Rodriguez’s parents did not know and did not use English in their home, him and his siblings did not learn English, and therefore they could not communicate with or effectively become a part if society or their own community. Rodriguez’s mother and father spoke only a hesitant, accented, and not always grammatical English, when they were in public, at home though, they would returned to Spanish as that is their “native language.” When Rodriguez would hear his parents speak English outside of their home he noticed that it was unclear. He could tell that the sounds and words were “as confused as the threads of blue and green oil in the puddle” (pg. 250) because Rodriguez noticed how his parents struggled with English, it had become unsettling for him to hear them speak it. With hearing them struggle Rodriguez himself had grown nervous and his trust, protection and power that he saw in his parents would be weaken. I believe this made it harder for Rodriguez to become more comfortable with speaking English because as a young child you often look up to your parents a lot and seeing them struggle isn’t what you want to see. So hearing his parents struggle with it made him believe that he would probably struggle with it as well. Then when his parents would return home they would go back to speaking perfect Spanish. This would be hard to see, to watch your parents going from fluent and comfortable in their native language to struggling when it comes to English, it would be hard to face the challenge yourself as you wouldn’t want to struggle in front of society and people that are so comfortable with their language and you are not. Because of this Rodriguez thought his gamily language and himself to be something apart from American Citizens. Richard Rodriguez does a very effective way of describing and explain how uncomfortable it was for him to see his parents struggle and how he didn’t want to struggle with English like they did but in order to be comfortable speaking outside of your native language you must trust yourself and let yourself learn the language and practice. Richard Rodriguez did have many people in his home life that spoke English, so therefore it wasn’t natural for him to pick it up or learn it. Before Rodriguez become a fluent speaker of the English language, he felt that Spanish, his native language, was a “private language.” Rodriguez felt his “private language” was something that was not socially acceptable, he felt embarrassed and nervous to speak
