Category: Reading Response

Something that I found interesting in the text “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan was her relationship and experience with her mother’s “broken” English. Throughout the text, Tan mentions how she had grown up around her mother’s “broken” English and had assimilated it into her own life and was accustomed to it. I had the opposite experience, which is why I found her relationship and experience so interesting. In my family, my father speaks near to “fluent” English while my mother speaks “broken” English. From a young age I’ve always spoken to my father, as well my siblings, in English, and I’ve always spoken Urdu with my mother, but not just any Urdu, I spoke “broken” Urdu. Throughout my life, my mother relates to Tan a lot more than I do. My mother has learned and has been accustomed to my “broken” Urdu rather than me learning her “broken” English.

In Sandra Cisnero’s “only daughter” she emphasizes the fact that shes the only female sibling in a family of six male brothers. Throughout her early life all she wanted to do was be recognized by her father and prove to him that she didn’t have to get married in college to be successful. I felt really touched by this reading mainly because she was determined to show her father that she had achieved something great in life that shes proud of. Just because she was the only girl, her father didn’t really seem to give her the same attention as her brothers. But it really touched me at the end of the story when she had recently had one of her stories translated into spanish  and had her dad read it, and when he finished it he seemed to be very proud of her and actually wanted more copies for the relatives. This was proof that her father finally gave her some recognition and realized how successful his daughter turned out to be. This sort of gave Cisnero some peace and weight off her shoulders to know that she had achieved the goal of making her father proud.

Unit 1 Assignments Part 1

Annotate “Mother Tongue”

1. “I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language — the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.”

Learning to speak in the mother tongue is very important for a child’s overall development. Being fluent in the mother tongue, which is also known as the native language, benefits the child in many ways. It connects him to his culture, ensures better cognitive development, and aids in the learning of other languages.

2. “The intersection of memory upon imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus’–a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.

A child’s first comprehension of the world around him, the learning of concepts and skills, starts with the language that is first taught to him. She uses her own way, which is writing, to make a bridge between these two cultures, because she thinks that language has power that we can’t imagine. Mother language has such an important role in framing our thinking and emotions.

3. “The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong.”

Mother language has a very powerful impact in the formation of the individual. Our first language, the beautiful sounds which one hears and gets familiar with before being born while in the womb, has such an important role in shaping our thoughts and emotions. A child’s psychological and personality development will depend upon what has been conveyed through the mother tongue.

4. “Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: “Not waste money that way.”

Tan is very attached to her mother’s English to the point that she doesn’t want to refer to it as “broken.” To her it symbolizes home because it’s the English she grew up with. She says it provides imagery and emotions that standard, grammatically correct English cannot.

Mother Tongue is about the authors struggles with her linguistic identity, her mother’s “fractured” or “broken” variation of english and the relationship with her mother. At the beginning of the piece we are told about the different types of english she would speak with her mother and with everyone else; we are then told how english wasn’t Amy’s strongest subject and later on we are told about the difficulties her mother experienced because of the way she spoke english and the prejudice she faced.

Tan talks about a few different types of English and in what situations she uses them, but each English form symbolizes something different to her. From my initial experiences and interactions with adults, I began to read words, processing letter-sound relations and acquiring substantial knowledge of the alphabetic system. As I continued to learn, I increasingly consolidated this information into patterns that allow for automaticity and fluency in reading and writing.