My journey through the Politics of Language

I didn’t expect to have assignments about ourselves when I originally registered in this English class. I truly believed that I would just read various articles and respond to various prompts, focusing not only on essays but also on multiple-choice questions. With all that I’d heard, I was nervous about starting. Since I had other classes, I expected this class to be a workload of assignments that would just add to my stress and anxiety. However, when the professor went over the syllabus on the first day, I realized that this class was much lighter than I had expected. I was fortunate enough to have a professor that was really communicative and made us feel at ease. Instead of lecturing us, she made sure we understood the work. I was given a couple of learning objectives I had to accomplish by the end of this semester which helped me better improve myself as a writer. 

Phase 1 was the assignment I enjoyed the most. At first, we had to brainstorm moments in our life that included language and literacy and this was a little difficult because I have so many moments where I can relate to this but I finally chose the one that most fit. I ended up speaking about a time where I couldn’t read properly at the age I was supposed to. I used appeals to pathos by expressing some emotions that I felt during my story. We then used the rhetorical worksheet that had to deal with rhetorical situations. The learning outcome I achieved in phase 1 was “Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.” Analyzing different genres while reading a variety of texts or listening to a ted talk stood out to me the most. For example, Mother Tongue was one of the most interesting texts I read because I felt as if many people can relate to having an immigrant parent go through obstacles because of speaking broken English. It also showed how people were oppressed because of the way they spoke English, even if it did make sense. Furthermore, I liked the handouts, specifically the rhetorical worksheets because they broke down many aspects such as the context/exigence, and helped me research more about the author’s background. I also achieved learning outcome 5 which had to do with engaging in the collaborative and social aspects of writing by participating in the discussions during class. I particularly loved blackboard discussions as a homework assignment because I was able to converse with my classmates about their perspectives on the questions we were given.

Although I struggled a bit during phase 2 which was the Rhetorical Analysis Essay, I still managed to enjoy it. It started with me having to choose a text we went over in class that I wanted to speak about. I chose Mother Tongue by Amy Tan right away. It caught my attention because she put her feelings into that essay and made me think about stories that I’ve heard from people close to me. This phase started off with a summary of what I wanted to focus on and analyze, which helped me. The learning outcomes I achieved were 1, 3, and 4. I achieved learning outcome 1 which is “Recognize the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages…” by indicating how language attitudes contribute to oppression. I was able to evaluate the author’s actions in her essay. They also helped me by being able to recognize rhetorical terms and use them to make my writing stronger. A homework assignment that helped me was summarizing this essay from the beginning because it made it easier for me to arrange the important key points. Learning outcome 3 that is “Develop strategies for reading, writing, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing,” helped me in this phase because I had to revise my essay a couple of times and re-read Mother Tongue several times to make sure I understood the rhetorical concepts that were used. Furthermore, in learning outcome 4 which is “Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations,” I had to use rhetorical concepts such as appeals to pathos which helped me better understand some of the feelings that Amy Tan used in her writing. As we did peer review, I was able to meet different people who gave me good feedback to make my essay better as I did the same for them. For example, as seen in the image, my peer reviewer gave me suggestions like doing more research on the publisher for my one-page summary.

Phase 3 was the research paper and although it wasn’t one of my favorites, I still enjoyed writing it. I liked how we had the option to pick our own topic and I chose to write about how Immigrants learning English can help them live a better life here in the United States. I decided to write about this because I know many people that experience this while having to face many obstacles. Also, I knew I would find lots of information online since this has been going on for many years. Learning outcomes 2, 7, 8, and 9 helped me write my essay which achieved these learning outcomes by locating which sources were trustworthy or not by looking at the author’s credibility. I mostly used websites that ended in .org or New York Times because I know that those are 2 sources I can rely on for their credibility.  Using synthesis in my paper was one thing I enjoyed because it helped me structure my ideas and sources, specifically the ones that had the same points. I also liked the rhetorical precis because it was organized by introducing the text, the author, learning how to properly cite, and locating the claim that the author is trying to prove.

Even though I didn’t achieve learning outcome 6 throughout the semester which is, “Understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences,” my understanding of it is using any type of technology to capture a wide range of people’s attention. Although my professor did use this by showing us videos in a slideshow, I didn’t personally use it for any assignment.

Overall, this English class was better than I expected. I enjoyed all of the phases and learned a lot. My writing became stronger as we moved on from phase 1 and now that I am writing the self-assessment, I noticed how much I grew as a writer. It has helped me comprehend and identify rhetorical situations in different texts. The homework assignments and classwork assignments were really considerate due to the fact that our essay would be a reflection of it.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.