Summary for the Year
Summary of What I Learned
This semester I have worked on and completed many assignments which have allowed me to learn and achieve many of the course objectives this year.
Edmund Ng
This semester, I have learned a variety of new skills and techniques that have improved and changed the way I write. One skill I have implemented into my writing more now, thanks to this class, is the use of multimedia sources in my text and drawing from the different advantages each medium possesses to support my argument. For example, scholarly sources are best used for statistical evidence and supporting logos, while opinion pieces are better for supporting pathos as they contain more anecdotes to persuade the reader’s sympathies. From the first assignment, I learned how my audience affected the way I write and the ways I could make my work more easily understood when speaking to an audience. One thing that is very different between writing an essay to be read and one to be spoken to by a crowd is the word choice used in the text. When writing an essay, it is generally better to use more descriptive words to better encapsulate your intention and for the reader to get a better understanding of what you are trying to convey. However, with a spoken format, people don’t have time to slowly dissect a text and read it at their own pace as everyone who is listening to you speak is essentially being forced to read at the same pace as you are speaking, so using overly large or convoluted words will end up confusing most or all of the audience and make it harder for them to understand what you are trying to say. The energy of the speaker and their disposition also affect how the work is seen. When I witnessed lower-energy or more shy presenters, their work came off as less exciting and personable compared to the more energetic or extroverted presenters. Phase 1 also helped me learn about the discrimination and oppression faced by minorities and the hurdles they face due to linguistic discrimination. For example, the personal essay by Amy Tan discusses the discrimination faced by Amy’s mother in her day-to-day life due to her strong accent, like when she was trying to find important medical files at the hospital but the staff and the doctor didn’t take her seriously until Amy with her standard English came and they were more amiable and listened to what Amy had to say. It can be seen that due to her inability to speak standard English, Amy’s mother wasn’t seen as someone who should be paid attention to and was ignored.
In phase 2, I continued to expand on the course learning objectives I learned in phase 1, such as the use of rhetorical strategies. In phase 2, I had to learn how to analyze and better use rhetorical techniques such as those found in June Jordan’s “Nobody Means More to Me Than You And the Future Life of Willie Jordan,” where I learned about the use of pathos, ethos, and logos and how they can be used in literature to better my writing. Another skill I have implemented in my work is learning to improve my revising and reviewing by working with my classmates and reviewing each other’s works by using a checklist or adding our input to improve our work. After receiving constructive criticism, I was better able to revise my work to improve on the weaknesses of my paper that my classmates eagerly told me about. I was also able to learn other ways to improve my writing by reviewing others’ work and seeing things I could improve in my paper by comparing our papers and finding similarities in what could be improved. Phase 2 taught me a lot about the writing process and taught me at a technical level how to improve my writing skills.
After learning to improve my technical skills in phase 2, in phase 3 I learned how to research and locate accurate and reliable sources to complement my arguments and strengthen my writing. To find these sources, I used different search engines and had the opportunity to use the library to access reliable information by using its resources and databases to find accurate information. I also used Google Scholar to find scholarly sources, which only had papers written by researchers and people with a lot of experience in their area of work, and I used regular search engines to find non-scholarly articles like opinion pieces, which had more results, but I struggled to find sources that fit my argument. When it came to multimedia sources, I used sites such as YouTube and Twitter and found opinions from people who were affected by the problems I stated in my paper. I was able to find many different opinions in the large mass of social media. I accurately differentiated between scholarly and non-scholarly sources, noted the different strengths of each, and used both in my essay so that it would have more opinionated perspectives as well as less bias and more statistical evidence. My original argument had also changed based on the evidence I have gathered, as parts of it didn’t fit with my evidence, so I made concessions and modified it so it didn’t contradict any of my evidence. After I had found my sources, I used MLA format, which required finding a considerable amount of information about the article or opinion piece so that I could accurately cite it. Another thing I learned from Phase 3 were issues of literacy and how language can be used to discriminate in countries and continents outside the U.S. and how history plays a large factor into how language is formed. By doing research and using a vast amount of resources, I learned a lot about linguistic discrimination in not only India but other countries as well.
Works Cited:
Edmund, Ng,”Learning To Speak.” CUNY Academic COMMONS. https://eng005.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
Edmund, Ng,”The Argument For Freedom” CUNY Academic COMMONS. https://eng005.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
Edmund, Ng,”India’s Language Problem.” CUNY Academic COMMONS. https://eng005.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
Learning To Speak
Edmund Ng
Learning To Speak
Originally I was gonna talk about my experiences being bilingual however after learning the whole class is bilingual I have decided to talk about my experience learning English.
Growing up the first language I remember hearing was Chinese. Chinese to me was the natural language, my parents spoke it,my cousins spoke it, and even my neighbors spoke it. My relationship with English at the time was limited and only something my parents spoke with strangers, that was until my first day of school. I don’t remember it that clearly but what I do remember was being really shy at the time. I grew up in a sheltered community so I only really spoke to people who spoke the same language up to that point. It was hard talking to the other kids with my very limited English at the time and I struggled to make friends. I thought at the time what I had to do was speak good English and that was what stopped me from making friends. So like any other kid desperate to make friends I got to reading, I would read the cereal box in the morning,read the books in the classroom,and even got to reading my older brother’s books who was 3 grades ahead of me. To me reading was like the golden ticket from Willy Wonka, a way for me to make friends and to talk to people outside of my home. However this plan didn’t work, I still couldn’t speak English well up to that point,and reading had given me the false confidence to start talking to classmates before I was able to truly speak the language. I can still remember some of the comments those kids made back then,”Your voice sounds weird”,or “Do you have something stuck in your throat.” Those comments devastated me as a kid and I went home crying that day.
I remember asking my parents at the time how they learned to speak English. I expected they would tell me something like to study harder or to just do it and slowly get better at it, but that’s not what they told me. They told me that they just listened to their favorite American musicians, for my mom it was Taylor Swift and for my dad it was Micheal Jackson. Looking back on it now they might have tricked me into liking the type of music they were into but at the time I was grateful and started singing and listening to songs like “You Belong With Me”, and “Smooth Criminal” in my free time until I was able to sing them with confidence. After I gained my confidence from learning to sing these songs as a kid I worked up the courage once again to talk to my classmates, my English was still broken but this time I didn’t leave after feeling embarrassed and although I was still teased and made fun of I learned to be proud of my own voice.
Phase 1 Assignment: Language and Literacy Narratives
The Argument for Freedom
Edmund Ng
Rhetorical Text Part 3
My argument is that “Schools should not be allowed to remove books from their libraries that they see as controversial.” My intended audience for this argument is middle-aged parents and educators as they would be most invested in these issues as they both are involved in children’s education and also hold enough influence to protest changes regarding education. The genre chosen to represent my argument is the political cartoon as in the digital age the best way to share information is the internet and easy-to-digest short arguments are more likely to reach a larger audience as more people are likely to share the cartoon. It also is a very versatile genre as it can also be displayed in the news or newspapers if it gains enough attention which would allow it to reach older and more traditional audiences as well. I would use standard English in this instance as the type of audience I am trying to reach are middle-aged parents and educators and are more likely to respond either neutrally or negatively to a more stylized English especially when it comes to the seriousness of the argument involving children’s education and the removal of controversial books.
Logos is a prime rhetorical technique when it comes to shorter formats as you can quote statistics or graphs much more quickly than trying to gain the sympathy of an audience which can take more time and if done too quickly can feel cheap or manipulative. That is why logos will be incorporated into my political cartoons as they tend to be quick to read and don’t have a lot of room to share many points. It also reaches a larger audience with logos as statistics are hard to refute and aren’t subjective to a person’s morality not aligning with who the author intended. A strong statistic can also work as a strong punchline to make the audience think about the implication of the statistics. My second rhetorical technique will be pathos as strong statistical evidence does not matter if it is shown that it comes from an unreliable source like “The Sun” as it will make the readers doubt the validity of the logistic weakening, however, if the source is reliable and has prestige like Harvard or Oxford than the argument becomes stronger than it was before and still works within the confines of a short political cartoon.
Higher reading exposure was 95% positively
correlated with a growing region supporting
semantic language processing in the brain.
Harvard Educational Review (2001) 71 (1): 79–130.
Phase 2 Assignment: Rhetorical Analysis
India’s Language Problem
Edmund Ng
Jarrett Moran
English 110
11/21/2022
India’s language problem
India has written into its constitution equal rights for all its people; however, why is it that the law still discriminates against minorities? When it comes to the implementation of its laws, India suffers from a bias problem.Oftentimes, laws are made to benefit the people who make them, such as in the case of what languages must be learned and when certain languages are allowed to be used.
Sukhmani Karan Singh Gandhi, a writer and journalist, asserts in “The Shadow of the Dark Soul” that India has a large linguistic discrimination issue. Gandhi supports her claim by showing how India has made it difficult for smaller tribes and minorities to speak their language with the system it has propagated. Her purpose is to spread awareness about this issue to people in India to help combat the discrimination the smaller communities are facing. She uses a very argumentative tone to appeal to the reader’s sense of emotion and hopes to get an Indian audience to start protesting for change. Overall, Gandhi’s paper purpose is to spread awareness on the issue of India’s discrimination against minorities and small communities when it comes to language.
Similarly Benedikter discusses the issues of discrimination in India and links todays struggles with the history of the sub-continent. In his scholarly report, Autonomy and ethnic conflicts (2009), Thomas Benedikter, a well-known author and political activist, asserts that India’s legislation has led to the decline of many cultures and languages throughout the region and suggests that the extinction of many of its languages is an inevitability. He backs up this claim by referencing the regions where these smaller communities reside and finding out the languages these residents speak. Next, he finds out how fluent each is in the languages they speak. Benedikter appears to write in the hope of causing this issue to gain ground in the political landscape so that it becomes a talking point for politicians to prevent the death of these cultures and languages. Because of the author’s conservative tone, it seems as if he writes for an older and more mature audience. Benedikter cites the danger of languages going extinct as he points to smaller communities losing fluently as members lose motivation to learn their native language.
However, a large reason for the fluGandhi’s text talks about the issue of linguistic discrimination in India regarding legislation, making it difficult for smaller communities to retain their languages. She focuses on how the law prioritizes language preservation with larger communities over assisting or allowing smaller communities to continue using their language in more contexts.Benedikter also deals with linguistic discrimination in India in his scholarly report but focuses on the history of how India chose the 12 languages it considers official languages to this day. He also reports fluent speech in smaller communities to show how the quantity of people who speak their native language is either stagnating or decreasing despite the country’s population increasing exponentially. Benedikter in his reports also comments on how Indian legislation has led to smaller parts of northern India being forced to learn more languages so that southern India can have its languages considered the official language, which is the antithesis of the equality India promotes regarding its people. Gandhi also has a similar perspective regarding the ways legislation needs to change for India to truly support equality in all manners, including linguistic equity. Gandhi’s purpose is for people to gain more awareness about linguistic discrimination so that change can occur and more people can continue speaking their native tongue. Benedikter also promotes awareness on this topic and has been a supporter of politicians who want to make this a more talked-about issue in India, as a lot of cultures may be lost if something is not done.
Sankranti Sanu is a contemporary political activist and has a bachelor’s degree in linguistics. He is well known for his book “Jai Hindi,” in which he critiques the Indian language programs and the way they prioritize Hindi over all other languages. Sanu, in his work, focuses on the discrimination against other languages native to India besides Hindi that is being tossed aside or neglected in favor of conserving Hindi across the country. His work in “Jai Hindi” is similar to Christopher Finnigon’s “Linguistic Minorities in India: Entrenched Legal and Educational Obstacles to Equality,” where he discusses the educational disadvantages of not being able to speak Hindi in modern Indian society. Finnigan introduces ideas like “benefit cost” into the discussion of why prioritizing Hindi hurts other languages, especially those spoken by minorities or smaller groups of people. Making Hindi the only language native to India required in education automatically makes it harder for others to learn Hindi, English, and their native tongue, as they will have to spend extra resources like time and money on top of what they already spend on Hindi and English. Both Finnigan and Sanu discuss the issue of linguistic equality in each of their respective works, but Sanu argues for Hindi to not have more power but to keep the system as it is, while Finnigan argues for a complete reconstruction of how language is taught in India.
The context for the discrimination of these minorities and tribal groups can be traced back to the 19th century, when India was still directly or indirectly under British rule as a colony and was ruled as a single state despite being composed of many countries and groups large and small that were all consumed and claimed by Britain as a singular country. At the time, the countries were all very different in cultures and languages, but the common denominator among all these groups was the need to learn the spoken language of their colonizers, English. To climb the social and career ladder, people had to learn the language to open up the new opportunities presented by the British. Eventually, the Indian subcontinent started to revolt and protest against British rule. After many attempts and failures, India achieved independence in 1947 and began the process of unifying the sub-continent under national unity, through which India was formed into the nation we recognize today. One of the first things that was done was the drafting of the Indian Constitution, and the amendment that pertains to the argument is the 8th Amendment, under which Hindi was considered the official language of India and the 22 official languages were designated. The official languages are languages that can be used to answer questions at higher courts and are allowed to be used when taking an examination for a higher public service. Of the 22 languages chosen, 12 were considered “the big 12” because of an age-old tradition dating back centuries. The other languages were ostensibly chosen based on the languages spoken by politicians, and many of those politicians who voted on and helped draft this amendment were based in areas deemed valuable by the British, which tended to be areas in South India, resulting in a large bias of languages from South India being included in the official languages.Many languages excluded and denied recognition were questionable, including Bhilodi with 9.6 million recorded speakers and Gondi with 2.7 million speakers, some of the largest spoken languages not included in the official languages. However, the people hurt the most were smaller tribes, as because of their smaller population, they have fewer speakers and have less political power to change their conditions, which has led to the slow death of the languages spoken by these people as the younger generation loses incentive to keep on practicing their language as they are unable to use it in scholarly settings.
In other words, my argument is that Indian legislation has allowed for minorities to be discriminated against and for the slow death of their languages. The history of India has caused the country to feel the need to nationalize and for different groups of people to come together and work as a single nation to solve their issues. However, although their hegemony is one of India’s strengths, it also causes issues when it comes to legislation and how different groups are treated, making equality an important issue. India is no stranger to issues of equality, from the caste system to colorism; however, an issue often ignored is discrimination based on language, which is one of the most overlooked and ironically one of the most important issues facing equality in India today. For a country built on the foundation of equality and uniting as a nation, the issue of discrimination being built so blatantly into the law is a crime against the ideals of what India has strived for.
Sources:
Benedikter,Thomas,”Language Policy and Linguistic Minorities in India”,Transaction Publishers,2009.
Ajit,k.,Mohanty,”Perpetuating Inequality: Language Disadvantage and Capability Deprivation of Tribal Mother Tongue Speakers in India”Channel View Publications Ltd, Bristol/Blue Ridge Summit,2016
Gandhi,Sukhmani”Linguistic discrimination of regional languages in India”Indian Times,8Jan,2020,timesofindia.indiatimes.com/readersblog/unscramble-expressions/linguistic-discrimination-of-regional-languages-in-india-9619/
Balakrishnan,Pulapre”Language discrimination”,The Hindu,6 June, 2019,thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/language-discrimination/article27526829.ece
Finnigan,Christopher,”Linguistic minorities in India: Entrenched legal and educational obstacles to equality”,LSE,21 Feb,2019,
blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2019/02/21/linguistic-minorities-in-india-the-entrenched-legal-and-educational-obstacles-they-face/
Sanu,Sakrant,”The Number 1 discrimination in India is linguistic discrimination”,10 Mar,2022,twitter.com/sankrant/status/1594907110265204736
Phase 3 Assignment: The Researched Essay
What I Have Learned
Part 1
The essay below was a composition of my own thoughts and experience with learning English below. I wished to highlight my own personal struggles and how I overcame my weakness in speaking the language and how important it is to be able to speak the native language. I, as a child, had trouble speaking English, which led to my isolation and difficulties in the classroom. Working on my language skills is a large part of why I was able to transition back into the classroom but it took a lot of work and the lack of resources I had as a child impacted my ability to more seamlessly navigate the complex intricacies of English and the difference between academic speak and more colloquial language was something in hindsight wish there were more programs at the time or resources I could’ve used to improve my speaking or practice speaking with others. Part of the issue is the lack of funding towards these types of programs are spread thin as their budgets tend to be limited and spread out among multiple groups, all of which require different and unique accommodations. I am not sure I would ever be able to gather up the courage and motivation to do what I did without the help and support of my parents and I chose to highlight this fact as many success stories like mine have an older guardian to help out the youth. Many times when it comes to issues like these the help of an older guardian is necessary and without it, it may be impossible for people to be able to complete their goals or focus on them without these support groups. The main message of my essay was to show my personal struggles but to also show how the help I got was the reason I was able to change my circumstances and improve myself to the person I am now. Learning To Speak
Part 2
In Phase 2 of this assignment, I learned a lot about how the audience of my text affects the way I write. My audience has always either been my teacher or my classmates so having the opportunity to write for an imaginary audience presented a unique challenge for me. I had a large number of topics I considered doing but I decided to write about why schools shouldn’t remove controversial books. The reason I chose this topic was that it already had a lot of discussion around it so I was able to draft a clear audience in my mind and because I had an interest in it so it would be easier to write an argument for this topic. The audience that best fit my topic was middle-aged parents and educators as that was where I saw the most discourse from these 2 groups online. To appeal to this group I had to consider the way they communicate in the digital age compared to younger audiences and what type of format would best appeal to not only this age bracket but the group in general. This is why I decided on a political cartoon as it fits the older demographic while also being easily spread and shared online to reach a wider pool of people. Next, I had to consider what rhetorical strategies I would use and decided on logos as political cartoons are a short format so statistics can be quickly displayed without distracting from the message of the cartoon. I also planned on using pathos as drawing from a reliable source strengthens the base on which logos sit as prestigious sources allowing the reader to better trust the facts. The second phase assignment has helped me to better understand how to locate and navigate research sources so that I could better support my argument with credible and accurate sources. The concept that impacted my learning and writing practices the most for this assignment was the audience. Considering the type of audience and the reach I was aiming for was something I learned how to do during this assignment, I learned to identify and target different groups depending on the type of message I was trying to deliver and to change the type of evidence or format based on whether it would resonate with my audience or if there was a more effective strategy I could use.
Part 3
My audience for this paper was people outside of India, as my goal was to spread awareness about an issue that is rarely talked about even inside India so that it could be better addressed and hopefully the legislation would change if countries outside of India reported on it and pressured India to change their policy. I tailored my essay to not use language that any average English speaker would not be able to understand and to make the information easily digestible and easy to understand so that many different types of readers would be able to understand the topic I am presenting. I used anecdotal scholarly sources from Indians to demonstrate how this issue affected Indians ranging from the average citizen to high-level government officials.Something that I learned while writing this paper was the surprising history of India’s formation and the events that created what India is today. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to include many of the historical facts I learned about India’s formation as they weren’t affiliated with the theme of the text or did not fit the context of the issue at hand. For example, consider the region where many of the languages differ from different parts of Asia and how, although there are over 100 spoken languages that are used by large groups of people, many of them can be related to one another through common ancestors from those regions. The term that most impacted my learning practices was the genre of the text, which dictated when and where it should be used and how it affected the way a writer presented their information. I theorize that more emotionally charged comments in these texts cause them to be shared more frequently, and that these shorter formats are better suited to sharing 1 or 2 key points with the reader vs. longer formats like books or scholarly reports, which tend to draw from a variety of sources, provide more context onto their points, and provide more context onto their points.This assignment has allowed me to improve on course learning outcome 6 by forcing me to draw on multiple sources in order to flesh out my argument, which caused the need for print and digital technologies in my text. The two types of texts allowed me to draw from a broader range of audiences and improve my argument by incorporating a broader range of perspectives. For example, a literature professor and a young political activist are two audiences who would not normally intersect unless they were specifically sought out via print and digital technologies.
