Audio Essay Reflection

When I first saw the assignment, I was not excited at all. However, concurrently taking a communications class has improved my public speaking and has made me more comfortable speaking to an audience. I thought the topic was really interesting and made me truly evaluate my experiences with language. Of course, family and culture are topics that have been discussed in my previous classes, but this was the first time that linguistic ability specifically has been the topic of discussion in class for me. After hearing the different stories of my fellow classmates, I began to realize how diverse we are. The United States is a melting pot of people around the world and the class is evidence of that.

An audio essay that had a strong impression on me was the first one, Rabsang’s. I really felt for him when he talked about the language barrier he faced with the Tibetan language. I had a similar problem where I felt less connected to my family as a result of the barrier I had unfortunately created for myself.

Jenny’s experience with language was truly eye-opening for me. When she started to speak about the car accident and what she had to do in that situation is something I could never do. It demonstrated to me the power of language and how much of an edge fluency in a country’s language gives people. I learned that language can become an important responsibility, especially if you are the only person in your family who can speak a certain language.

I was very curious about Nikolai’s story as well. We all had unique experiences; however, his circumstances seemed extremely difficult as he had moved to two different countries. I could only imagine what it would be like to move to a country where both my parents and I could not speak the language.

Overall, the audio essay assignment made me very conscious as to be aware of people’s different backgrounds and experiences. I learned that the majority of my classmates are bilingual, some even multilingual, and our different cultures and backgrounds creates an extremely diverse learning environment with a lot of different perspectives.