Personal Narrative: My English Learning Autobiography

Once upon a time, there was a girl whose first language was Arabic. When she was a kid, she admired anyone who could speak English. She had a dream of speaking English one day. As a result, she had a strong desire to learn English. This girl is me, Eman. I am starting my language learning autobiography as a story because stories always have value, and are worth a lot to someone. My English learning autobiography expand several stages of my life: elementary, middle, high school, college, and my career as an English teacher in the United States. My journey to speak Arabic has been a combination of both my family origin. I was born in the United States; while I frequently traveled to Egypt with my parents, before they decided to live there permanently. I learned to speak Arabic first. As children, my siblings and I were forbidden from speaking English at home. My mother’s reasoning was that we will learn English because we live in the United States; Arabic was taught and spoken at …show more content…
I returned with more confidence in my Arabic Language skills. I was nervous, as I had to speak English for the first time, daily. In addition, the English that I learned in Egypt was British English, so I was struggling with understanding and talking in the American dialect. For my language learning experiences, I found out the best way to learn a language is through communicating with native speakers in targeted language. This defends Vygotskian theory, the Socio-Cultural Theory, about the development of human cognitive and higher mental function, which argues that the development of human cognitive and higher mental function comes from social interactions and that through participation in social activities requiring cognitive and communicative functions, individuals are drawn into the use of these functions in ways that nurture and “scaffold”