Surabhi's Blog

1. My research question is: What difficulties did you face growing up, with language development, and how were you able to overcome them?
2. I decided to interview my friend, Roxanne, who uses a hearing aid and I would like to know more about her experiences.
3. Script:

• When did you start using a hearing aid?
• What has that been like?
• Could you tell me about some of the challenges you faced growing up?
• How were you able to overcome these challenges?
• How many languages do you speak?
• How did you learn these languages?
• Did you face any challenges during this time?

I would probably interview a couple of my friends and a couple of random people. This person / people might help me answer my research question because I broke down my research question into different questions and I think that makes it easier for people to give me short answers which I can incorporate into my Literature Review. They would be useful for my research paper because it would help answer some questions that I am trying to answer in my paper. Two questions that I would ask are: “How many languages do you speak?” and “How did you come about learning these language(s)?” and another question I would ask is “Do you think it is possible to learn a new language at this point in your life or do you think it would have been easier in infancy or childhood?”

I want to research how language and speech develop in infants and how they extend into adulthood and also how they differ across cultures. One of the sources I picked was from the slides from my other psychology class. The slides mostly talked about the first words and sentences that infants speak and although this is not my research question, it answers some of the sub – questions that I am trying to answer in my paper. I categorized my source as a background because while it is important, it is not the most important source and does not really play a role in the main part of my essay. It could also be considered “common knowledge”. In my essay, I want to start of by explaining how infants begin talking and how they learn the meaning of words and share some studies done by researchers to support my point. Then I want to move on to talking about how they develop language or languages and how this develops into adulthood. Then I want to talk about how languages differ from each other, mostly English. Since this source mostly talks about the first words of infants, I want to focus on that and how exactly infants learn to understand the meaning of words and how.

I have had many literacy sponsors throughout my life. My teachers have been huge literacy sponsors in my life. I mostly learnt how to write in Preschool when we were made to trace out alphabets to practice our writing and in turn, they were getting paid for what they did. This is not really related to my life but I have heard a lot of people getting paid internships to learn something like coding or graphic design and in turn work for the respective companies when they have gained the skill set. I think social media can be considered a huge literacy sponsor because people learn to use apps such as Snapchat and Instagram which can be used as another form of texting and in turn the founders gain more popularity and make more money. If you think about it, food manufacturers could also be considered a literacy sponsor. You can buy food from them to keep yourself healthy and full and in turn they get more money to make more food. College is another literacy sponsor because we pay thousands of dollars to get a degree from a university and in turn colleges make sure they set us in the path of a career.

I was never really good at writing. In fact, I would dread the day that I was assigned something to write. For my American Studies Class in High School, we had to write research papers and they were the worst! The main idea of section 1.6 is that writing is not as natural as speech even though writing and speaking are not too different from each other. When speaking, I normally do not have to think up a thesis and an argument like I would have to when I’m writing but at the same time I can’t really hit backspace on my words when I’m speaking like I can when I’m writing which is the one thing I do not hate about writing! We wrote ‘Dear Future Me’ letters during my junior and senior year of high school and that was something I really enjoyed because it was super fun writing down my thoughts and then looking back at it really late in the year. I do believe that writing mediates activity as it says in section 1.5 because when I’m writing, I’m busy putting my thoughts down on paper without thinking much about anything else which I really like.

Some of the main topics we talked about were code – meshing, code – switching, monolingualism, bilingualism, multilingualism, and language in general. Prior to this unit, I did not know what code – meshing or code – switching meant but once I knew what it meant, I could really relate to it. I also learnt that White Mainstream English is considered the universal language pretty much everywhere and there are so many other dialects of the same language that are considered “informal” which is kind of dumb. Everything that we have learnt so far is important to me because I speak four languages and when I moved to the States, I was always embarrassed of my different accent and tried everything I could to speak more like the people here until I did. I think it is very important to consider all the different kinds of languages that people speak everywhere and not put them off as being “informal” or “unimportant” because that kind of speaking is how they were brought up speaking and telling them that is not the right way of speaking is just wrong. I think the fact that we are allowed to write in our dialects in this class is super cool!

The Hate U Give almost made me cry but it was very interesting at the same time. The main protagonist, Starr Carter, lives two very distinct different lives. One who lives in Garden Heights with a predominantly black population and one who goes to a private school with a diverse population. The Starr who lives in Garden Heights can be herself and not constantly worry about what people think of her. The Starr who goes to Williamson speaks like everyone else and changes her personality to fit what would be ideal to the students who go there. But at the same time, she is automatically considered cool at Williamson because she is one of the very few black kids who go there but at Garden Heights, she doesn’t stand out. Code Switching plays a huge role here because when she is with her friends in Garden Heights, she doesn’t have to worry about switching her speech because everyone speaks just like she does but when she is at Williamson, she has to worry about speaking more “White Mainstream English” because she doesn’t want people to know where she’s actually from. In Amy Tan’s article titled “Mother Tongue”, she talks about how her mother speaks English but not very clear for everyone to understand, for a lack of better terms, “broken”. Because not everyone can understand her, they don’t give her the same respect they would to someone who speaks “perfect” English. She also talks about how when she is around her mother or her husband, she talks the same way her mother would and everything is normal but when she is around her friends or in a professional setting, she switches her language. Code – meshing plays a huge role here because Tan speaks in the same “broken” English her mother does with her husband without even realizing it and her husband is used to this so he doesn’t notice any difference in her language. I can relate to this because whenever I call my mom, I tend to speak to her in a mix of English and my native language, Tamil or just “broken” English even though both my mom and I can speak English pretty well.

English was not my first language but I started learning how to read, write, and speak the language at a very early age. English, although sometimes does not always make sense to me now, was always considered the universal language that everyone had to know. People living in non – western countries had to learn English and take entrance tests in English to get into a good school. Living in India, I remember our teachers telling us to only speak in English and if they caught us speaking in another language, we would get some form of detention. I feel like learning to speak English was not extremely hard at the age of two because I had already learnt to speak two other languages. My parents spoke to me in one and to each other in the other and just by being around them, I was able to learn both and I can speak both even to this day. When I started going to preschool, pretty much everyone around me spoke in English and my parents also spoke English at home to help me learn quicker and I think that helped a lot. Supposing I did not know English, it would be extremely difficult if I tried to learn it at this point in my life. As we go on speaking English, we introduce the concept of slang. For instance, to refer to a group of friends, I say “y’all” or saying “extra” to refer to someone that is being unnecessarily and overly dramatic. I personally use a lot of these slang terms when speaking to my friends because I know they understand what I am saying and a lot of them use them as well. But when I am speaking with my parents and use some of these slang terms, they ask me to explain what I mean when I use a slang term. In school, if we accidently used a slang term, especially in front of an english teacher, they would correct us and tell us that that was not the right way to speak.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton