Name: Rifat Sultana

Subject: Freshman Composition

Instructor:

Language and Literacy NarrativeI am a Bangladeshi and I have been learning to speak English for last two years. Learning a new language isn’t always easy. It has it’s up and down moments but ones I learned that language I felt accomplished and a lot of new opportunities. My point is learning English for me wasn’t easy. In 2019 me and my family moved to the UNITED STATES hopeful for a better life from Bangladesh. Most challenging thing was I couldn’t speak English very well because my first language was Bengali. When I first started school, I really didn’t know any English. It was hard because none of the student’s knew what I was saying, and sometimes the teachers didn’t understand what I was saying. I was ashamed to admit that I am not brightest students anymore. I hardly understand any English. Sometimes I knew answers in class, but I didn’t know how to explain in American English. I thought everyone might be laugh at me then I kept quiet. I was put in those ELL classes where they teach you English. The room they would take us to was full of pictures to teach us English and teach us how to read and write. When I would go back to the regular class, I would have to try harder than the other students. I would have to study more and harder with reading and writing if I wanted to be the same label of the other students. I was very uncomfortable sitting next to my classmates who were born here. One day I went to my aunt’s house and my all cousins are talking in English. There was only one person which is me I couldn’t speak in English. That moment was so embarrassing for me. Therefore, I wanted to gain a wider range of vocabulary. I expanded my vocabulary

by reading novel’s that I found interesting in the library. I would read novels that was I interested in or that“Girl in Translation” by Jean Kwok. I really like this Novel because it’s match to my story. “When young Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to America, they speak no English and own nothing but debt. They arrive in New York for a better life., but I find instead a squalid Brooklyn apartment and backbreaking labor in a Chinatown sweatshop. Unable to accept this as her future, Kim decides to use her “talent for school “to earn a place for herself and her mother in their adopted country. Disguising the most difficult truths of her meager existence, Kim embarks on a double life: an exceptional student by day, and a sweatshop by worker by evening. In time, Kim learns to translate not just her language but herself, back and forth between two worlds, between hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation” I found that story in me. At end of the chapter, I would then identify each of the word’s I didn’t know and try to connect them with some real-life examples so that I would remember the term. Writing down my thoughts and feelings stuck me all throughout the years because this was one of the toughest times in my life and writing down what I was dealing with was my way of getting my feelings out of my system. None of my friends really knew what I had to go through because they have never had to deal with a situation like me. That’s why it was just tough on my part to tell them the issue I had to deal with. Few times that I tried to tell them what was wrong when they asked, they didn’t really act to concerned what I was saying. I felt like I was the only one facing such a problem at the time. I felt judged situation that I was in. Any word that I ran across that I didn’t know the meaning of, I would write it down on the sheet of paper I kept tucked in the back of the book I was reading. One of the novels I read that wasby my friend’s. sometimes I was pretending that I understand everything what they were saying. I was ashamed. Once I learned English, I was able to help out my parent’s more and a bunch of new doors opened for me. You can say by knowing English I had little more power now at home because they depended a lot on me know but it also felt great just to help them out with their English. I struggled a lot. I think I am still struggling. I believe I could speak English like a native speaker one day.