Personal Narrative: My First Language Acquisition

I remember what Pre-K was like. Imagine little Elvia. She 's at St. Edwards Catholic Church and School. She is quiet. Her first language is Spanish and it is what she speaks at home the most. She understands English because it is what her father speaks, but she doesn’t speak it much. She listens to the kids and teachers around her and eventually catches onto the language a little more. She hates the English language! Fast-forward. Now she 's at the end of kindergarten. In order to pass onto first grade she is asked a series of questions. She is stubborn. One of the questions is to count. Clearly, it has to be in English and because of that she does not want to do it." One, two, three, four, cinco, seis siete, ocho", and the counting goes on in Spanish. The teacher informs her mother about what she has done during dismissal. When they get home she sits Elvia down and tells her that whether she likes it or not she had to speak in English or she wouldn’t pass kindergarten. From then on her mother bought her books and Elvia began to read. She had books in English and in Spanish. …show more content…
I couldn 't find a way to make myself interested in the things I was reading. Every year there was a new summer reading assignment and every year I didn’t read it. I would try to but along the way I would end up opening Sparknotes and reading the summaries of each book instead. At times I felt bad because I knew that I should be taking advantage of the access I had to those books, but they bored me. I longed to be able to dive into books and absorb everything in them, but I couldn’t get more than my toe in the water. Surprisingly, English still became my favorite subject. I no longer had the dreaded accelerated reading I had to do in middle and elementary school. I was still forced to read some books that I didn’t enjoy during the summer, as I said earlier, but I liked some of the things we did during the