Becoming Fluent in the English Language

• List and describe those people and/or communities that have influenced your sense of language.

• List the times when you realized that you did not have the fluency to participate in a language community fully. Describe how you felt; describe the actions you took because of these experiences.

• Describe how you became fluent or how you learned to understand the most effective language in a community.

I became fluent

• Identify some of the language communities in which you have tried to become fluent. Explain why you wanted to belong to the particular language community you are writing about.

• Describe with examples the major characteristics of the language community/communities you will be focusing on

The second part of this assignment asks you to analyze your experiences with a language community/communities in relation to some issues developed in your reading selections. To help you get started on this part, you may want to consider some of the following issues or questions:

• Language is often associated with power, as Barbara Mellix suggests. Analyze the connections between power and your language community/communities.

• In your experience, how does being a member of a particular language community make you tend to exclude others from the group? What are the benefits of being included as a member of a particular language community? (Perri Klass)

• Barbara Mellix writes and Richard Rodriguez implies that with every gain in becoming fluent in one language community, there is also a loss. Do you agree? Why or why not?

As you write in response to these questions and issues, you should be able to generate a great deal of material. Explore this material for significant insights that you can develop into a 4 to 6 page (typed, double-spaced) essay. Shape the material in the way you think best addresses the two tasks: narration and analysis. Provide two references within the paper to the sources we’ve read on the topic—Klass, Mellix, Rodriguez, Tannen, Pinker (I will cover how to put these references together in more detail in class).

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