Prior to writing my "lens" essay, I found many interesting sources involving the strengths of dialects and accented forms of English. The most interesting source that I referenced in my essay was a blog titled A Beijinger in America created by Bridget Pei, a student from last semester's English 101 Multilingualism course taught by Dr. Suhr-Sytsma. In this blog, Bridget discusses her transition from China to America, as a Chinese international student. She distinctly uses Chinese-accented English to communicate her thoughts, and specifically tries to relate to international students who have gone through or are going through the same experiences as her. In my essay, I explained my observation that Bridget Pei's blog is not only an efficient but also an engaging way to connect to specific audiences, through her distinct use of an accented form of English. I elaborate that Pei's language is concise, despite some grammatical flaws, and is also easily relatable to other Chinese students because her style matches the way Chinese international students think in and use English. I argued that this type of connection primed Chinese accented English [or other accented forms of English for that matter] for narrative writing and travel essays, similar to how Vershawn Ashanti Young argued that "the rhetorical devices of blacks can add to the writing proficiency of whites and everybody else" (Young 71). I discussed that within the tourism industry, many travel brochures and writing must be able to persuade tourists to visit specific places. Tourism has a lot to do with the crossing of cultures and races, as people enjoy exploring new countries. In turn, I argue that using accented forms of English in western English pedagogy can be useful in that it helps students, whose native languages are not English, develop skills in narrative writing, since accented forms of English are so easily relatable to audiences/readers who share similar heritages and backgrounds as the writer. Using accented forms of English such as Yiddish English or Chinese-accented English can help break language barriers within the tourism industry and make traveling a more appealing activity.
2 Comments
Paavali Hannikainen
3/1/2015 09:32:35 am
I think you really bring out an interesting point about the benefits that accented English offers foreigners who don't have English as their native language. Foreigners can relate better to the language through offering an accented versions of it, based on their own native language. Still, I wonder how native English language speakers would relate to this, and how foreigners would be able to interact with native English language speakers. I question whether this interaction would be hard as there is focus on accents and other English language speakers would struggle understanding what a person from another country is saying. For example, I still have a very slight Finnish accent and my friends who were born and raised in the US can't always understand what I'm saying. Having even stronger foreign accents might hinder interaction between fluent English speakers and people with different native languages who have focused on learning accented English language. I would wonder to what extent that this learning of accented English would result in communication conflicts? Would it truly hinder interaction between people with different native languages?
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Brandon Amirian
3/1/2015 02:57:35 pm
I find it interesting that you propose the idea of using different accents of English outside of academics in order to improve and better connect tourist with the country that their visiting and their various sites. This almost relates to the phenomenon of American businessmen men who take classes in order to become familiar and learn different dialects of English. In my essay, I suggested that by learning different dialects in school, businessmen that have to go overseas to China, India, or Japan are better able to converse and understand their counterparts when they need to do business, and eliminate the need for some of these classes. I do believe that there are many practical uses for multilingualism outside of academics.
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AuthorJesse Wang |Emory 2018 Archives
April 2015
CategoriesMy Multilingual Experience by Jesse Wang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. |