Mother Tongue

Hello and welcome back to this Lang and Lit blog. Its been too long since the last post, so I'm sure your "eager" to hear what I have to say. However this blog will be slightly different from the others, this shall be an opinionated discussion about Amy Tans, "Mother Tongue" article. Her article goes through multiple struggles that non native English speakers face when moving to a prominently English country. How they are treated differently, schools often move them away from English and into maths and sciences, as well as just being viewed differently.

The final point above is what I want to focus on, how society see's these people due to their lack of skill with the english language. The first example of this would be from Amy Tans article, from when she begins to talk about her life in school. Throughout her years in education she was always pushed towards the mathematical and scientific side of education, due to her struggles with english as well as for here ethnicity, with the stereotype of Asians "being exceptional at maths and science". This is highly unethical and in a way racist, because of her skin and accent she was treated slightly different and not as an equal in her english class. For an Ib student, I feel that this truly is unfair, and have seen students with next to no knowledge of english become fluent speakers of the language. Although times have changed and people are a lot more opened-minded I still believe that this was an inappropriate response by the teachers. If we look into modern day society there are still many instances where this is happening. For example, have you ever changed the way you speak to match someone who is not a native english speaker, or have you seen someone do this. I've looked into this and have found that this is extremely common. Even I do it, when trying to communicate with someone who struggles at understanding the english language. I personally believe that you will be viewed differently based on you level of understanding and skill of a language, but should be phased by it because that can be changed, Amy Tan is a great example of this.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to new topics for this blog.