Tongue

In the essay “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan. Tan emphasizes that we all speak in different languages in our own way, and how we are categorized by the way we speak. In this essay she is talking about how her Asian mom talks in a different kind of English and how that affected her growing up. Tan has a mother who is from Asia, she speaks in a language that Americans would call “broken English.” Tan said that she would all ways have to make phone calls or talk for her mom when they would go places…

only truly believe that there is one outcome to immigration: it is hard and people suffer. Which in most cases is true, but at the same time people need to realize that there are many diverse outcomes. Looking at “Niño” by David Mitchell and “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan side by side sheds light…

In The Mother Tongue, author Bill Bryson asks a variety of questions about English. These questions range from wondering about how we can be overwhelmed and underwhelmed but not whelmed with to why colonel is pronounced with an r when one does not exist in the word.The overall purpose of Bill Bryson’s book is to determine why English is the way it is today. Bill Bryson dives into the history and evolution of English through the appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos, the best example starting with…

In Gloria Anzaldúa’s essay “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers”, she discusses the agency that comes with writing as well as some of the difficulties that may come with writing for third world women of color. Throughout the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements, writing has proved to be a source of agency and conflict for those involved, particularly women. Both groups of activists, Chicano nationalists and the members of the Young Lords Party, discussed the importance of…

The article, “Imitation of Tongue Protrusion in Human Neonates,” started off discussing previous research in the field. Although the discussion of previous research was not an in-depth analysis of any of the research, it provided some insight into the specific study that the article is mainly about. Through reading the article, the research question becomes clear; the experimenters wanted to examine if newborn infants possessed the ability to imitate simple actions, specifically the ability to…

November 2014 Contextual Analysis Essay Literacy and Language From Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” it is evident that language has an effect on our lives. Language defines the type of person I am generally and it has had an effect on my choices as well as my lifestyle. Using “Mother Tongue” and my own experience with literacy, I can conclude that literacy helps us communicate and mature as human beings. In “Mother Tongue” Amy Tan describes the many ways in which the language that she was taught…

In her article, “Mother’s tongue”, Amy Tan narrates the changes of cognition of her mother’s tongue based on her own experiences. She begins her essay by introducing herself as a writer instead of a scholar of English, which ingeniously makes a closer connection with readers. She describes three personal anecdotes from different time periods of her lifetime to create a comprehensive view for the definition of “Mother’s tongue”. The first one happened recently at her speech, which is the…

In these days learning different languages is very important, people respect you by the way you speak, if the person is good in English for example they treat him as well as they could but if the person has a broken English they do not give him any attention and despises him. Unfortunately, the language is becoming that combine between people or separate them. It’s important to be good or perfect in English, English is the language of the world. Also, a lot of people are perfect in English some…

In the article Mother Tongue by Amy Tan, she scrutinizes her mother’s language, her own use of English and society’s response to different peoples English usage, to show us the power of a language. It’s not very often that we see Asian- Americans writing books and getting big hits, because some English that they write or speak is not fully understood. Tan uses her own personal experiences to get us to realize that language is so broad. She uses a lot of examples of her mother’s “broken” English,…

In Gloria Anzaldua’s, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” she emphasizes her feelings on the racial, societal and cultural differences that she faces as a Mexican living in the United States. Anzaldua’s story starts with the setting of her at the dentist. She writes, “I hear the anger rising in his voice. My tongue keeps pushing out the wads of cotton, pushing back the drills, the long thin needles. And I think, how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it? How do…