A Girl Who Thought She Knew It All

It is funny how something as simple as a name can change who you are and who you will become. I grew up as a normal all American girl with a family of eight. I had four brothers, a sister, a beautiful mom, and an amazing dad. I had a little house with a huge yard where I could run and play with my siblings and went to an amazing school where I had many friends. But one day the world stopped. I got to school, went to put up my bag and my name tag had been replaced with “Makaela Brissenden.” I was utterly confused on where I was supposed to put my backpack. I walked up to my teacher and ask why my nametag was replaced. She told me that it was not. It was simply corrected. Corrected? My last name was “Smith” not “Brissenden.” But, I did not argue. I simply put my things away

In many schools throughout the country, there are populations of students that have been pushed to the side, with their education thought of as just their specialized teachers’ responsibility. While this situation is changing for some students, such as those with disabilities and students who are lucky enough to have dual language immersion programs in their school, many students who are learning English are still struggling to access the same curriculum that everyone else in the school has a chance to learn. Guadalupe Valdés (2001) looked at the English as a Second Language (ESL) program at a school which she called Garden Middle School. Although Valdés completed this study over fifteen years ago, the experience that her focal students had

At the end of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, June Woo travels to China to meet her half sisters, and notices that American culture is thoroughly present there. Roswitha Fischer, the author of the academic journal article “English Personal Names in International Contexts,” examines the cross-cultural exchanges that occur between the United States and other countries in terms of personal names. In China, she notes, English names have important implications in improving China’s economic and social development. Young Chinese children are typically given an English name by their parents or teachers, and later in life, they keep their English names for a variety of reasons, like easy pronunciation. It has become almost trendy to make use of English

I was a sophomore at Galileo High in San Francisco, and all my Caucasian friends agreed: I was about as Chinese as they were. ” (.) Because June never felt truly connected to her Chinese heritage, it caused a separation between her mother and herself. June talked about how she didn’t understand her mother’s Chinese references. June said, “These kinds of explanations made me feel my mother and I spoke two different languages...

When immigrants move to another country, some use English first names while others maintain their birth names. Koreans are one of the ethnicities that more commonly use English first names once they immigrate to North America. While previous studies have focused on relations between identity and English name adoption as well as reasons behind immigrants’ English name use and birth name maintenance, little research has examined the phenomenon with an ethnographic focus. Through qualitative interviews with ten Korean Canadian 1.5 generation immigrants, my thesis portrays the complex processes of English and Korean name acquisition, use and maintenance in different social and formal contexts.

Lavenders’ ESL class, she decided that it was time for me to attend regular classes. I was so afraid, not because I would not be competent in the classes, but because I did not think I was ready for a full emergent in the language. I was competent and knowledgeable on the subjects assigned, Geography, Math, Science, but English? I was just completely in a mortified stage. Would I understand the teacher, classmates? Would I be able to speak clearly enough, so they would understand me? That weekend, before I was to report to my first all-English class on Monday, I did not sleep nor could I eat anything thinking about that moment. Monday morning I walked into Mr. Garfield English classroom. Mr. Garret was aware of me been assigned to his class; he was standing right at the door. When I came in, the first thing Mr. Garret did, was to ask the class to be quiet for a minute. He then proceeded to introduce me to them. I had never felt such a panic as I did at that moment. I was sweating, quivering; I felt a thousand eyes just staring at me. Mr. Garret quickly noticed my somber demeanor and immediately asked me to have a seat. I am sure he thought I was going to have a panic attack, and I’m not sure if I wouldn’t have if he did not step in quickly and asked me to have a

Hi! I’m Jessica Littley, and I was born on September 15th, 2001, in Melbourne, Australia. My family is made up of my mother, father, brother, and a sister, immigrated to Guangdong China, for my father’s job, when I was seven nearly years old. At first I wasn’t very comfortable with the thought of my family living in china and leaving everything behind, but after a while I got the hang of it and I enjoy living in china. When I was a kid I had already knew how to speak two languages which then I was bilingual. I knew how to speak french, but I had forgotten all of it and now I have gained the skill of speaking Mandarin quite well. While adapting to a new school, with new people, in a new country, I had made a few friends.

My family of five is blessed to have unique names that are quite different from the common “Sams” and “Johns” floating around the United States. However, it is not the tongue twister names that confuse people as they get acquainted with my family. When I share the names to others, I never fail to baffle people at the end of my list, Heonsu, Misug, Onyoo, Youngeun, and Sarah. “Sarah?” they exclaim. “Wait, what? Why is her name different?”. Every time this occurs, I am forced to explain in my practiced speech tone, “My family immigrated to the United States from South Korea when I was six. We all have Korean names, but my little sister was born here, so she has an American name.” Most people are satisfied with this answer before I can splurge with more information. They just leave, scratching the backs of their heads and continue with their mundane tasks. As a result, no one truly knows all the bizarre events that led to my little sister’s common name.

I moved to Tennessee when I was ten years old. I left my home, school, family, and friends due to my mom’s marriage to my stepfather who lived in a different country; although they were together for five years, I never expected to move so far away from everything I had ever known and grown to love. I attended Smyrna middle school that year and no longer had friends, my new “home” didn’t feel like home to me and the rest of my family now lived 12 hours away by plane. I couldn’t speak English and was instantly placed in an ESL classroom. To my luck, my teacher was very passionate about his job. He could speak eight languages, one of them happened to be Portuguese. He was thrilled about having me in his classroom,

I was born in China, where almost all people speak Chinese, so I did not start learning English until third grade. Going into my first English class, I almost knew nothing about English. Initially, I was nervous when I saw my first English teacher, Mrs. Huang. However, Mrs. Huang was an experienced and patient teacher. To help students overcome their fears of English, she divided the class into several groups to let us help each other at the beginning of class. Although it has been a long time since my first English class, I can still remember how she used her distinctive teaching style to encourage us to learn English and motivate our interests on reading and writing. For example, when Mrs. Huang was introducing the alphabet to the class, she described the alphabet as some interesting images so that students could remember the alphabet more easily. After a few months, my classmates and I became familiar with the alphabet and some basic words like “apple”, and Mrs. Huang began to teach us how to communicate in English. Mrs. Huang started teaching

the day and English at night, but my transition was harder due to my poor foundations of the English language. I now had to speak, write, and read in English, when I preferred my native language, Spanish. Immaculate Heart Elementary School provided a tutor to help me read from the textbooks in my third grade class. I had difficulty communicating with the teacher and classmates. I felt embarrassed for not understanding English, and sad knowing that it was hard to speak with my Spanish accent. Even though I was placed in such an unfamiliar and difficult situation, I enjoyed the educational atmosphere. I felt safer in an environment where I had some individual attention. I began to write essays about various social studies related topics such as the 41st President of the United States and the Statue of Liberty. I recall spending a lot of my time thinking about the ideas I should mention in those essays, but I spent even more time trying to get those thoughts on lined paper. I wondered whether I was saying things the correct way. I felt behind compared to the other student in my class. I didn?t know the basics of grammar, like when to use ?is? and not ?are?, when everyone else had mastered that area of study. I struggled thinking in Spanish and

My name is Jiniku but everyone calls me Joey, including my parents. My father is American but my mother is not. My mother grew up in a country whose name I cannot pronounce correctly. She was educated in French and Latin, Spanish and German, and when she went off to college, she did not learn in her native language. She went to college in Paris, studied in Berlin. She spent a year in Rome and visited Madrid. She wrote letters home to her parents in an alphabet that I cannot read. I believe once her parents died, she never spoke in her native tongue again.

Now in hindsight, there were some clues. Like having Chinese parents who spoke Chinese and periodically took me to China.

At the start of class, the first item on the to-do checklist of an instructor is to obtain an overall sum of who is present and who isn’t. A share of those names are Asian Americans who will have an English name prearranged or will request a nickname that they favor, which will undoubtedly be an English name in several circumstances. Once questioned as to why the individual has/prefers an English name the answer is typically their authentic name is ‘too challenging’ to pronounce. However, many will offer to study the individual’s real Asian name if they desire to use it, yet these students still resist and wish to occupy an English name, even when the name is considerably simplistic to recall nevertheless they refuse to adopt it! Consequently, this further proposes that there are additional explanations beyond the pronunciation concerns.

My name is Kajal Patel and I have grown accustomed to people mispronouncing my name. I think the first day is always the worst for me because I’m always dreading that moment when my teacher fails at an attempt to say my name. I introduce myself as a two-syllable Kaa- juhl, because I think I’ve always been scared that my name sounded unusual to Americans, and maybe even too ethnic.