The main task of this semester was to understand and analyze the topic of the politics of language. The text that I connected with the most was Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue.” Amy Tan’s narrative opened me up to linguistic standards and how they can hold back some people from being able to express themselves fully. My mom can understand very little English and can speak even less, which results in my siblings and me being her interpreters. I was able to connect with Tan’s narrative since her mother also needed assistance when dealing with talking in English. After reading Tan’s narrative, I started to understand the importance of language and how it is used to build your social perception. I achieved the outcome of “examine how attitudes towards linguistic standards empower or oppress language users” by writing a letter to Amy Tan where I shared my thoughts and connection to her story. I quote from my letter, “When I was reading your accounts of your mother not being able to express herself fully in English, I kind of went into memory lane remembering times when my mom would put me on the phone to make a doctor’s appointment or interpret something for her.”

When starting Phase 1, I never thought about any encounter with language and literacy; the only memory that had a strong impression on me was learning English when I came to the US. When composing the essay, my first thought was just to write the story and worry about the rhetorical strategies later. I was unsure how my writing came out, but after the first peer review session, I felt more comfortable writing about it and sharing more information. I tried to keep in mind that this was something my classmates would enjoy reading, not just some random story from my life. “Explore and analyze, writing and reading, a variety of genres, and rhetorical situations” really helped at this point in putting my essay together because we had read and analyzed multiple texts in class to better understand rhetorical situations and what the authors were trying to get across to the readers. Each author had a unique way of engaging with the audience, which helped me compose my narrative with a mix of tones that made it easy to read and kept the reader interested.

Phase 2 was doing a peer review of one of our peers’ narrative essays and composing a peer analysis. This helped me achieve the learning outcome of “develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing” since we were working in groups the whole time reviewing each other’s drafts and interviewing one another to get a better understanding of our peer’s personal narrative. I also struggled with this phase because my integration of the interview into my peer analysis was unnatural and sounded very forced. Thankfully, I was able to get insight into my analysis of my peer by asking my peer if I had understood the points she was trying to make in her writing. Having feedback on my writing helped me revise and make appropriate edits to my work.

In Phase 3, we had to create a research paper on a topic of our interest that considered the relationship between language and literacy. I chose the topic of people’s perception of accents. Although I was uninterested at first, the more I looked into sources, the more I wanted to learn. I was able to achieve the learning outcomes of “compose texts that integrate a stance with appropriate sources, using strategies such as summary, analysis, synthesis, and argumentation” and “practice systematic application of citation conventions.” When reading the sources, I had to analyze the similarities between each source and how they would connect with my claim. This included paraphrasing and explaining quotes while also giving my own thoughts on the claim made by the author. We had homework where we tried to use synthesis on two sources, and I was able to learn to integrate various texts to support my claim.” Alexandra Kozlowski and Dr. Pragya Agarwal both share the idea that people tend to build an unconscious bias towards a type of accent.”

In class, we learned how to properly use the MLA format for in-text citation, a works cited page, and how to form a header. I also achieved the course outcome of “locate research sources in the library’s database or archive and on the internet” by exploring the CCNY online database and using Google Scholar to look for sources. We had a homework assignment where we used key words from our topic to gather various sources to analyze and use to support our claim. An example would be searching the key words “accent perception” on Google Scholar and getting “30 million hits” and writing down sources. “Titles of promising sources: “The Influence of Accents on Social Perception” and “Accent Bias: How Can We Minimize Discrimination In The Workplace?”

From Phase 1 to 3, I was able to achieve most of the course objectives as well as learn more about myself as a writer and learn various skills that have helped me improve my writing. Although I didn’t achieve all the course outcomes, I have learned a lot this semester about language and literacy through reading various texts and researching on my own. The learning outcome I didn’t achieve was “recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.” I struggled with this because I found it hard to write with rhetorical terms when I didn’t have a written piece beforehand. I countered this by doing my writing first, then applying rhetorical terms afterwards to better fit my written piece. All the phases really helped me get comfortable and explore the topic of the politics of language to learn about myself and make me interested in learning about other people’s experiences.