Audio essay reflection

At first, when the teacher assigned this assignment, I was very resistant. I don’t like to reminisce about the past and share my stories with others. I also don’t want to record my true feelings. But now, I realize the point of this assignment. After listening to the audio-essays of each student, I found that each of us has his own unique experience, and just like me, we have experienced many difficulties due to language problems. It makes me realize that our linguistic identity had more or less changed as we grew up. We’ve all been confused or lost in the process of defining our linguistic identity.
I really resonated with the essays of Joan and Gary. We all went to many classes to learn a new language. They doubled their efforts to achieve today’s results and speak fluent English while I’m still trying to learn English. We all struggled a lot to adapt and balance between Chinese and English. In common with them, I also use chinglish when communicating with my family. Joan said that she sometimes would unconsciously speak English and Cantonese in order to express better. I wrote something similar in my essay “when I talk to my mom or my sister, I will mix some English words when I talk to them in Chinese.” I find similarities with Gary’s experience of being struggled when he first came to a new country and no one in his classroom cared or even paid attention to him. When I first came to America, I had experienced exactly the same situation as him.
I think Maria’s essay is very appealing to me. She talked about her experience of learning English, specifically how she transformed from a person who didn’t know English at all into a person who could speak and write in English fluently. Her audio-essay is very positive and it’s interesting to hear that when she said she helped others to learn English and translated English to her native language.
All in all, the way of recording the essays and present them in front of the class is a great way to share our personal stories with others and I really appreciate this activity because it actually helped us to know each other better.