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  • Essay / Mother Tongue: Different Types of English Described by Tan

    The Struggles of Being an ImmigrantIn Mother Tongue, Amy Tan talks in depth about 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 didn't understand her. Tan talks about the four different types of “English” that she and her mother used and how it affected her childhood and adult life. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Tan describes the four different types of English she would use at home and outside the home. She used "plain", "broken", "limited" and "correct" English, but did not like to use the word broken because broken means there is something that needs to be fixed. Since people sometimes didn't know what Tan's mother was saying, she had to speak for her. Tan knew how to speak “good” English and because of this she had to call professionals and pretend to be her mother. For example, Ms Tan needed to resolve a situation with her stockbroker, so she asked her daughter to call her and speak on her behalf. “I had to call and say, “This is Mrs. Tan” (Tan 465). It was difficult for Tan growing up because it was a regular 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 she spoke "proper" English, she was breaking away from her mother who did not speak English "properly." know how to speak like this. The aim of the author of the text is to show people that there is no one correct way to speak English because it is a very diverse language that can be spoken in many different ways. Works Cited Angelova, M., & Tamez-Méndez, MA (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 difference: struggling to express yourself in a multicultural world. Language and Society, 35(6), 753-770. Choi, M. H. (2010). The struggle to be American: An exploration of immigrant students' identity formation through an English course. Linguistics and Education, 21(1), 20-34.Flores, N.M. (2017). Troubled race and language: toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 38(6), 507-521.García, O. (2009). Education, multilingualism and translanguaging in the 21st century. In The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism (pp. 349-362). Routledge. Kanno, Y. (2003). Negotiating bilingual and bicultural identities: Japanese returnees between two worlds. The Modern Language Journal, 87(1), 33-49. Kubota, R. (2016). Raciallinguistic ideologies and the problem of exclusively English-speaking ideologies. The Journal of Modern Languages, 100(S1), 64-80. Li, W. (2011). Analysis of the moment and space of translanguaging: discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Great Britain. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5), 1222-1235. Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation (2nd ed.). Multilingual questions. Tan, A. (1990). Native language. In The Best American Essays of the Century (pp. 456-465). Houghton Mifflin.