The Difficulties of Being an Immigrant In Mother Tongue, Amy Tan delves into how difficult it was for her mother to be a recent Chinese immigrant. She had a very strong Chinese accent and most of the time people said they couldn't understand her. Tan talks about the four different types of "English" that she and her mother used and how that affected her childhood and adult life. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay. Tan describes the four different types of English he would use at home and away from home. She used the English “plain,” “broken,” “limited,” and “correct,” but she didn't like using the word broken because broken means there's something that needs to be fixed. Since people sometimes didn't know what Tan's mother was saying, she should speak for her. Tan could speak “correct” English and for this reason Tan had to call professionals and pretend to be his mother. For example, Ms Tan needed to resolve a situation with her stockbroker, so she asked her daughter to call her and speak for her. “I had to pick up the phone and say “This is Mrs. Tan” (Tan 465). It was difficult for Tan growing up because it was a normal thing. She always had to go back and forth between speaking like an American and speaking like her mother, a Chinese-American. In conclusion, Tan felt that when he spoke “correct” English, he was breaking away from his mother who did not know it. being able to talk that way. The goal of the author's text is to show people that there is no correct way to speak English because it is a very diverse language that can be spoken in many different ways.Works CitedAngelova, M., & Tamez-Méndez, M.A. (2019 ). Negotiating identities and languages: the experiences of immigrant families. Journal of Bilingual Research, 42(3), 289-305.Canagarajah, S. (2006). Negotiating communication norms and differences: Struggling for voice in a multicultural world. Language and Society, 35(6), 753-770.Choi, M.H. (2010). The struggle to be an American: An exploration of immigrant students' identity formation through an English lesson. Linguistics and Education, 21(1), 20-34.Flores, N.M. (2017). Disturbing race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 38(6), 507-521.García, O. (2009). Education, multilingualism and translation in the 21st century. In The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism (pp. 349-362). Routledge.Kanno, Y. (2003). Negotiating bilingual and bicultural identities: Japanese repatriates between two worlds. The Modern Language Journal, 87(1), 33-49. Kubota, R. (2016). Raciolinguistic ideologies and the problem of exclusively English ideologies. The Modern Language Journal, 100(S1), 64-80.Li, W. (2011). Analysis of the moment and space of translation: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5), 1222-1235.Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation (2nd ed.). Multilingual issues.Tan, A. (1990). Native language. In The Best American Essays of the Century (pp. 456-465). Houghton Mifflin.
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