Mingdong Chen
Freshman
composition
Ms. Nargiza
Matyakubova
September 27
2013
Literacy
narrative
Learning English as an immigrant
I would like to briefly introduce myself
to you in the beginning; my name is Mingdong Chen who is an immigrant from
China in 2010. I am 21 years old this year. I have been in United States for 3
years or so with my mother and old sister. My family lives in an small
apartment in Brooklyn, I learn to be independent in United States with the helps
of my parents and high school’s teachers, being capable of bravely facing any
challenges come any time, dealing with difficulty, keeping unmovable during the
hard times since everyone has his own business. Language is a bridge of
communication with people, so I am gradually learning to speak English. However,
I do not practice speaking often it, I used to learn the language by myself
instead of discussing with others, I do not know what reasons cause me to be
like that, but there are two things I want to share with you, my pleasure
reading and my personal experiences of writings.
I have my “tiny library” in
my bedroom created by my father. It is a desk which leans on the wall. With the
increasing of the number of my books, my father decided to make a bookshelf for
me. He installed an flat wood 12-inches above the desk into the wall with his own
methods, then he continuous installed the second one same high as the first
time above the desk, he carefully constructed it and made it strong enough to
support the heavy books. With the emergence of the “tiny-library”, I can put
the book I would like to read on the bookshelf, which can force me to open it
and read it when I see it, because I found an habit I have. If I always put
away the books and put them inside the box, I would not see them in daily, so I
would not read them consciously. With the appearance of “tiny library”, it
looks as if an alarm clock that remind me of reading book on time when I see
them, it also offers comfortable environment for my daily reading as well as reinforcing
my personal habits of reading books on the desk instead of laying in the bed,
or just sitting on the floor. And I am getting fond of sitting the wooden chair
closes to the desk reading what I want as time passes, “tiny-library” looks
like as a teacher leads me to the road of literacy
In my own homeland, in fact, I
personally seldom read the extracurricular books during from the periods of the
elementary school to middle school to high school, but I usually did the sports
and played the basketball with my classmates after school, and then finished
the homework at home, so I seldom did the reading unless the teachers required
me to do that. I am here to confess that my personal experiences of reading is
little, but which does not mean that I am not able to the reading work, I just
seldom read the books from out of class, however I usually carefully read my
textbook, I will underline the sentences or some special vocabularies while I
am reading, and figure out the meaning of words or sentences which may be related
to the main idea of the article. Sometimes I will copy down the format of sentences
expressed in the article; I may learn to use its format in my personal writing
in the next time. After finishing reading, I may write down the main ideas of
the article in short sentences and its lessons leaves on the margin side. Studying
English in the United States, my personal reading experiences has changed with the
movement of place. In the English class of ESL，First,
I will intend to find out the meaning of vocabularies I don’t know by looking
up them in the dictionary in my cellphone. Second, I will try my best to
understand the meaning of the whole sentence by combining the meaning of
vocabularies I found before. However, sometimes there are lots of different
interpretations for one word, so that I do not know which definition of word I
need to choose to make the meaning of the whole sentence sound correct.
The first high school in
United States I attended was Manhattan Comprehensive Day and Night High School
which is located in between 14th street and 15th street,
second Ave in Manhattan, maybe very few people heard about it. I spent almost
three years to study ESL English program from level 1 to level 5 with my
teachers’ help in that high school. I could have had a chance to jump directly from
level 2 to level 4, but I insisted that I should follow step by step if I
really longed to learn English very well. In the daily English class, we
usually did the writing work, some reading work, a little speaking work and
very little listening work. So I intended to be better at writing and reading
parts, and the lack of speaking and listening. Even though I could do better in
writing, however I had some habits of writing which I didn’t know if they were
positive or negative to me, I used to spend some hours on how to arrange the
paragraphs of each essay, what should I write down in each paragraph to make it
look perfect, and what kind of words or vocabularies should I use in each
sentence to make it sound vivid, I thought I had a lot of work to do to prepare
the beginning of each essay before I started to write down it, did everyone
have same experiences as me? So I profess that I cannot be able to writing a
perfect essay in limited time. Also I would like to arrange or make sentences
in my mind before I speak out to someone because my spoken English is not good
enough I think, and sometimes I would forget the spelling of words I didn’t use
them often. In the beginning of learning ESL English, I thought I learned a lot
of useful English skills or experiences from my teachers’ lectures and the some
grammar books which I studied by myself when I had free time, but I gradually got
a strange phenomenon in the later days of learning English, which was that I
felt like I learned less and less English skills in daily English courses
later, and I do not like to talk with people in English. in other words, I
might considered that there was nothing could make me interested in learning
English again.
All in all, I hope teachers
can provide me with lots of important and valuable suggestion on listening,
speaking, readings and writings in the future days of college, and helps me regain
the interests and enthusiasm of learning English .What’s more, the above some
bad habits I have shown can be corrected, and I long to learn lots of or
different kinds of vocabularies and improve my memory toward the spelling. So I
am looking forward to the help from you.
In conclusion, we all know
admittedly that offering rewards can be an incentive that attract students to
study hard and get good performance, but we must bear in mind the main purpose
of studying knowledge is itself-----------education, that is it. It is enough
that we own a pure heart to study, do not disoriented by the extraneous things.
Be yourself!
