The Development of a Foreigner’s English
Imagine yourself in a new world, where everyone is easily communicating with each other. What they are talking about sounds familiar but the meaning is difficult to decipher because you still do not comprehend what they are really saying. That is how my experience with English started out as a foreigner in the United States and it was evident to the people around me that I was lost. Subsequently, I was placed into classes that were meant to improve my English literacy and only that. I was indirectly taught that as an American citizen, I was only allowed to have one culture: “American” and one language: English. There was no room in my brain for my native language/culture because “you are in America now, this is Ah-meh-ri-cah, speak English!” I found it difficult to speak fluent English since it was my second language and I spoke ,what many teachers told me, “broken” English. I was put on reading and writing contracts to “fix” my problem. Lack of support in my home with reading and writing made it difficult for me to learn English at a quicker pace. My mother almost made it a crime to speak English in our home and my father was neutral but only spoke Yoruba with us but we would still respond to him in English. The only situations they really got involved was when I would bring home red cards and papers that needed their signature.
I hated the color red in general: the red cards my teachers’ at school rewarded me for not following directions and the red my teachers’ faces turned as they were grading homework assignments which signaled to me that they had reached my work. The worst red was the markings on every error I made on my assignment with comments written in red for my parents to see. I had to “make sure to bring this back tomorrow with your parent’s signature signed on the bottom.” The teacher who gave me the most red markings once said to me “you’ll never get anywhere in life with this type of writing. Your letters are too big and it's so messy I can’t even read it.” His comments really had a negative impact on my life because after that, I stopped caring about the comments my teachers would make on writing. And since I did not have a support system outside of school to help me with my writing, I became my own teacher.
“English is a stupid, boring and a plain language with rules that not even the teachers could get me to understand”, I would tell myself each time I received my writing assignments back with pages filled with red markings. As a result, I grew a deep hatred for the English. I stopped paying attention to rules and started paying attention to each teacher’s writing style. I told my ears to shut down when my teachers would talk and relied mainly on what my eyes saw. If my teacher had words that ended with “ly”, I would try to add as many “ly” ending words in my writing. If my teacher wrote five words before the word “and”, I would write five words before “and”. It is amazing how I got far in life with just mimicking my teachers without fully understanding why an adverb describes a verb or what the definition of a “verb” was. “Does this look right? It looks right, right? If it's wrong they’ll just tell me to use another word instead of this word anyway.” That is the process I used to teach myself how to construct sentences in English. I found this process easy because it was a self-taught process. However, I still hated, almost despised, the English language and that same negative mentality stayed with me throughout my adolescent years.
Frustrated with English, all its rules, and the teachers who I felt should lose their jobs, I turned to slang. I adopted slang as my default dialect when I was in middle school because it was easier to understand and speak. I mainly spoke this dialect with my friends since I learned very quickly that adults were easily angered by this version of talking. Slang was easy to understand since it did not follow strict English rules and 95% of the time it did not make grammatical sense at all. The significance of slang as part of my process in my literary development is quite unusual. I used slang as a rule of what I should NOT do in my writing. The best part about slang was that I would NEVER be graded on it...as long as it did not use this language in my assignments. I still did not understand the rules of English but I knew that slang was a pet peeve ALL my teachers shared and hated to read in students’ writing. So if what I was writing sounded like slang, I would change the whole sentence. I was doing well with all the self-taught methods I used to survive my English classes until I reached high school where I had a teacher who refused to let me get by in school with “my weakass writing.”
Robert Robinson was a high school English teacher whose impact on my literacy development changed the way I perceived English as a whole. I remember one of the first assignments in his class, which was a practice “personal statement” that we would continue to build on until senior year, the time to apply for colleges/universities. I remember sitting in class not wanting to go in depth into my life because I hated everything about my childhood--that is another story for another time--. But it was required and I had to complete it so I forced myself to write. I used my writing method that I taught myself on this essay and it was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made in my English classes.
When I received my paper back, I had received comments like “you can do better than this”, “what does this even mean?”, “You have great ideas here but I want you to go in depth, expand more on what you mean. What impact did these experiences have on you?” I ignored the comments because I still had the idea that my method was better and no teacher could ever tell me what to do. However, Mr. Robinson was not having it and those comments kept appearing in my writing assignments. Every time, the comments sounded angrier than the previous assignment. Until one day he came to me and told me “do not fail my class because you are not putting your best effort into these assignments. They ain’t for me, I already graduated school, its for you and you need to work on your writing if you want to be successful. And quite frankly, I am tired of reading your weakass writing.” I took his words to heart because it was the first time I had ever been told that I could be successful in writing let alone successful in general. Some may think his words were a little harsh for a ninth grader but I needed to hear them. To me, it showed that he cared so I made a promise to myself that I would never fail him because he believed in me.
As the year went by, my writing improved. Outside of class, I started writing with a purpose instead of just to get an assignment done. Inside the classroom, I would ask questions until I was certain I understood what he wanted from us in the assignments. I was always scared that my writings would sound too angry or that I just missed the whole point of the assignments. However, his comments on my paper became more encouraging and he stopped indirectly talking about me in class when he mentioned “some of you are not even trying in this class and I can tell.” It was really rare in my neighborhood for teachers to actually tell when we were taking school seriously or not. Many of our teachers really could care less because they were “still going to get paid anyway whether we wanted to learn or not.” Mr. Robinson was, thankfully, not one of those teachers. I unfortunately had to leave his class my sophomore year to take care of another graduation requirement but I kept his words and teachings with me. In my English class that year, I never received a grade lower than an A on all my assignments. My teacher’s comments on my papers in that class were always along the lines of “very insightful work” “you write really good points I did not even think about” “your writing makes me want to read more of your work.” I could not believe what I was reading but because of these comments I began to do even more writing outside of class for my writing which helped me strengthen my knowledge in literacy.
Fortunately, I was able to be placed in Mr. Robinson’s class again after that year which by then was the class to be in. By the beginning of junior year, EVERYONE in my school wanted a taste of Mr. Robinson’s teachings, philosophies in life, and his sense of humor in general so it was truly an honor to be in his class. It was also around that time when Mr. Robinson and I learned that my strongest area in writing is when I wrote argumentative papers that caused people to think beyond the surface of what we are conditioned to think. He said “I see you’ve improved greatly in your writings. Your essays are more structured, flows a lot better, and your style is so unique that even if you do not put your name on the assignment, I would still know it is yours. I can hear your voice as I am reading it.” This was great because even though I was still struggling, he focused more on the positive parts of my essays more than the negatives. Through one-on-one meetings, various writing assignment practices, and major essays, I moved my way up in class from being one of the students who was not even trying to THE student to ask for help when you needed your paper edited to Mr. Robinson’s liking. Even when my peers received their papers back, I would hear him ask them “did Jumoke help you with this?” or he would come to me and say “I know you helped __with their paper. As soon as I saw a change in their writing I knew you were behind it.” Then my peers would come to me and tell me that their grades went up. I even had friends from other classes come to me for editing purposes and they never received a grade lower than a B for their papers. By the end of junior year, my self-esteem had skyrocketed. Mr. Robinson also tried to mimic college grading rubric so it was really hard to get a B in his class. I proudly never received any grade lower than a B.
The impact Mr. Robinson had on my writing development really changed my life academically. I went from hating English to wanting to learn more about the language so I can be a fluent speaker, not a fluent complainer. My whole negative mentality changed and that helped me with my writing since now I actually valued English. It is also evident that Mr. Robinson was more than just a teacher by the way my class and his students before my class spoke about him. He is no longer a high school teacher but a Ph.D. student on a full ride scholarship at Columbia University. I will be forever grateful to Mr. Robinson because he was more than a teacher to me, he is one of my inspirations in life. I would not be at UC Davis if it was not for the way he carried me under his wings and showed me what I could do with just words. He said to me “you have a voice and it is a powerful one. Keep your culture, don’t change that, but also learn to embrace this new one. There’s beauty in every language Jumoke, find that beauty and use your writing to bring them alive.”
Mr. Robinson’s words of wisdom, encouragement, and willingness to never give up on me shaped who I am as a writer overall in ways that I can never repay him for. Through him, I gained brand new confidence in myself that made me feel like an important person. That my words mattered and I should learn how to use it in a more effective way other than to express my complaints on assignments. He also helped me understand that developing literacy skills is a lifelong process, not a skill that someone acquires overnight. Some people get the rhythm early in life others take a while, even years, like I did. The journey was tough, frustrating, and confusing but it was worth it. I am still learning the rules of the English language but I have gained an abundance of knowledge throughout my experiences as a result of my willingness to learn. My process is still under construction but I am getting better, especially now since I am taking writing a lot more seriously than I did in my adolescent years. Who knows, I may see my writing published somewhere soon and on that day I will thank Mr. Robert P. Robinson, the person who contributed to the development of this [me] foreigner's English.
Imagine yourself in a new world, where everyone is easily communicating with each other. What they are talking about sounds familiar but the meaning is difficult to decipher because you still do not comprehend what they are really saying. That is how my experience with English started out as a foreigner in the United States and it was evident to the people around me that I was lost. Subsequently, I was placed into classes that were meant to improve my English literacy and only that. I was indirectly taught that as an American citizen, I was only allowed to have one culture: “American” and one language: English. There was no room in my brain for my native language/culture because “you are in America now, this is Ah-meh-ri-cah, speak English!” I found it difficult to speak fluent English since it was my second language and I spoke ,what many teachers told me, “broken” English. I was put on reading and writing contracts to “fix” my problem. Lack of support in my home with reading and writing made it difficult for me to learn English at a quicker pace. My mother almost made it a crime to speak English in our home and my father was neutral but only spoke Yoruba with us but we would still respond to him in English. The only situations they really got involved was when I would bring home red cards and papers that needed their signature.
I hated the color red in general: the red cards my teachers’ at school rewarded me for not following directions and the red my teachers’ faces turned as they were grading homework assignments which signaled to me that they had reached my work. The worst red was the markings on every error I made on my assignment with comments written in red for my parents to see. I had to “make sure to bring this back tomorrow with your parent’s signature signed on the bottom.” The teacher who gave me the most red markings once said to me “you’ll never get anywhere in life with this type of writing. Your letters are too big and it's so messy I can’t even read it.” His comments really had a negative impact on my life because after that, I stopped caring about the comments my teachers would make on writing. And since I did not have a support system outside of school to help me with my writing, I became my own teacher.
“English is a stupid, boring and a plain language with rules that not even the teachers could get me to understand”, I would tell myself each time I received my writing assignments back with pages filled with red markings. As a result, I grew a deep hatred for the English. I stopped paying attention to rules and started paying attention to each teacher’s writing style. I told my ears to shut down when my teachers would talk and relied mainly on what my eyes saw. If my teacher had words that ended with “ly”, I would try to add as many “ly” ending words in my writing. If my teacher wrote five words before the word “and”, I would write five words before “and”. It is amazing how I got far in life with just mimicking my teachers without fully understanding why an adverb describes a verb or what the definition of a “verb” was. “Does this look right? It looks right, right? If it's wrong they’ll just tell me to use another word instead of this word anyway.” That is the process I used to teach myself how to construct sentences in English. I found this process easy because it was a self-taught process. However, I still hated, almost despised, the English language and that same negative mentality stayed with me throughout my adolescent years.
Frustrated with English, all its rules, and the teachers who I felt should lose their jobs, I turned to slang. I adopted slang as my default dialect when I was in middle school because it was easier to understand and speak. I mainly spoke this dialect with my friends since I learned very quickly that adults were easily angered by this version of talking. Slang was easy to understand since it did not follow strict English rules and 95% of the time it did not make grammatical sense at all. The significance of slang as part of my process in my literary development is quite unusual. I used slang as a rule of what I should NOT do in my writing. The best part about slang was that I would NEVER be graded on it...as long as it did not use this language in my assignments. I still did not understand the rules of English but I knew that slang was a pet peeve ALL my teachers shared and hated to read in students’ writing. So if what I was writing sounded like slang, I would change the whole sentence. I was doing well with all the self-taught methods I used to survive my English classes until I reached high school where I had a teacher who refused to let me get by in school with “my weakass writing.”
Robert Robinson was a high school English teacher whose impact on my literacy development changed the way I perceived English as a whole. I remember one of the first assignments in his class, which was a practice “personal statement” that we would continue to build on until senior year, the time to apply for colleges/universities. I remember sitting in class not wanting to go in depth into my life because I hated everything about my childhood--that is another story for another time--. But it was required and I had to complete it so I forced myself to write. I used my writing method that I taught myself on this essay and it was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made in my English classes.
When I received my paper back, I had received comments like “you can do better than this”, “what does this even mean?”, “You have great ideas here but I want you to go in depth, expand more on what you mean. What impact did these experiences have on you?” I ignored the comments because I still had the idea that my method was better and no teacher could ever tell me what to do. However, Mr. Robinson was not having it and those comments kept appearing in my writing assignments. Every time, the comments sounded angrier than the previous assignment. Until one day he came to me and told me “do not fail my class because you are not putting your best effort into these assignments. They ain’t for me, I already graduated school, its for you and you need to work on your writing if you want to be successful. And quite frankly, I am tired of reading your weakass writing.” I took his words to heart because it was the first time I had ever been told that I could be successful in writing let alone successful in general. Some may think his words were a little harsh for a ninth grader but I needed to hear them. To me, it showed that he cared so I made a promise to myself that I would never fail him because he believed in me.
As the year went by, my writing improved. Outside of class, I started writing with a purpose instead of just to get an assignment done. Inside the classroom, I would ask questions until I was certain I understood what he wanted from us in the assignments. I was always scared that my writings would sound too angry or that I just missed the whole point of the assignments. However, his comments on my paper became more encouraging and he stopped indirectly talking about me in class when he mentioned “some of you are not even trying in this class and I can tell.” It was really rare in my neighborhood for teachers to actually tell when we were taking school seriously or not. Many of our teachers really could care less because they were “still going to get paid anyway whether we wanted to learn or not.” Mr. Robinson was, thankfully, not one of those teachers. I unfortunately had to leave his class my sophomore year to take care of another graduation requirement but I kept his words and teachings with me. In my English class that year, I never received a grade lower than an A on all my assignments. My teacher’s comments on my papers in that class were always along the lines of “very insightful work” “you write really good points I did not even think about” “your writing makes me want to read more of your work.” I could not believe what I was reading but because of these comments I began to do even more writing outside of class for my writing which helped me strengthen my knowledge in literacy.
Fortunately, I was able to be placed in Mr. Robinson’s class again after that year which by then was the class to be in. By the beginning of junior year, EVERYONE in my school wanted a taste of Mr. Robinson’s teachings, philosophies in life, and his sense of humor in general so it was truly an honor to be in his class. It was also around that time when Mr. Robinson and I learned that my strongest area in writing is when I wrote argumentative papers that caused people to think beyond the surface of what we are conditioned to think. He said “I see you’ve improved greatly in your writings. Your essays are more structured, flows a lot better, and your style is so unique that even if you do not put your name on the assignment, I would still know it is yours. I can hear your voice as I am reading it.” This was great because even though I was still struggling, he focused more on the positive parts of my essays more than the negatives. Through one-on-one meetings, various writing assignment practices, and major essays, I moved my way up in class from being one of the students who was not even trying to THE student to ask for help when you needed your paper edited to Mr. Robinson’s liking. Even when my peers received their papers back, I would hear him ask them “did Jumoke help you with this?” or he would come to me and say “I know you helped __with their paper. As soon as I saw a change in their writing I knew you were behind it.” Then my peers would come to me and tell me that their grades went up. I even had friends from other classes come to me for editing purposes and they never received a grade lower than a B for their papers. By the end of junior year, my self-esteem had skyrocketed. Mr. Robinson also tried to mimic college grading rubric so it was really hard to get a B in his class. I proudly never received any grade lower than a B.
The impact Mr. Robinson had on my writing development really changed my life academically. I went from hating English to wanting to learn more about the language so I can be a fluent speaker, not a fluent complainer. My whole negative mentality changed and that helped me with my writing since now I actually valued English. It is also evident that Mr. Robinson was more than just a teacher by the way my class and his students before my class spoke about him. He is no longer a high school teacher but a Ph.D. student on a full ride scholarship at Columbia University. I will be forever grateful to Mr. Robinson because he was more than a teacher to me, he is one of my inspirations in life. I would not be at UC Davis if it was not for the way he carried me under his wings and showed me what I could do with just words. He said to me “you have a voice and it is a powerful one. Keep your culture, don’t change that, but also learn to embrace this new one. There’s beauty in every language Jumoke, find that beauty and use your writing to bring them alive.”
Mr. Robinson’s words of wisdom, encouragement, and willingness to never give up on me shaped who I am as a writer overall in ways that I can never repay him for. Through him, I gained brand new confidence in myself that made me feel like an important person. That my words mattered and I should learn how to use it in a more effective way other than to express my complaints on assignments. He also helped me understand that developing literacy skills is a lifelong process, not a skill that someone acquires overnight. Some people get the rhythm early in life others take a while, even years, like I did. The journey was tough, frustrating, and confusing but it was worth it. I am still learning the rules of the English language but I have gained an abundance of knowledge throughout my experiences as a result of my willingness to learn. My process is still under construction but I am getting better, especially now since I am taking writing a lot more seriously than I did in my adolescent years. Who knows, I may see my writing published somewhere soon and on that day I will thank Mr. Robert P. Robinson, the person who contributed to the development of this [me] foreigner's English.