Reading Responce - Part 1

Having first seen the title of our reading, "Me Talk Pretty One Day", I jumped to the conclusion that we were going to read about an underprivileged individual who missed out on fundamental English education. Much to my surprise, however, I found myself reading about a middle aged man who not only volunteered but paid to learn language by the seat of his pants. In America, we are familiar with a sort of ‘on the job training’ that many immigrants must go through in schools and in life in order to pick up not only language but customs while keeping up with the pace of our society. All sociopolitical stances regarding immigration aside, I found myself pondering whether the story was comparable to what an average non-English-speaking immigrant goes through in our country. Some obvious differences immediately popped up in my mind. First, I would like to think that, in America, most ESL teachers, or any kind of teacher for that matter, would not be quite as blunt as the instructor in the story. Second, the author of the story does not have to maintain a job or other school subjects while learning to speak the language, and therefore does not deal with the same sense of urgency or necessity in relation to being able to communicate coherently. However, due to his teacher’s scornful nature, the author experienced the same apprehension and lack of self confidence that I would expect a new English speaker to feel when undergoing everyday tasks. I would expect, despite the difference in venue, immigrants in America experience some level of introversion and solitude at one point or another during their learning process, perhaps even more so than the author. On the other hand, while many immigrants have family or friends of similar heritage with which to practice, the author of the story was alone and felt his abilities were inadequate for casual conversation with the locals. Having worked as a bus boy at a restaurant with several Spanish/English speaking coworkers, I noticed that those individuals of similar heritage seemed much more comfortable talking to each other, be it in English or Spanish, than to any of the other English speaking staff. All of that being said, I think the author’s experience would be as close as any of us would want to come with what many people go through every day in our country.