Name:Ibrahim

College: Queens college

Professor: Jorge Velez

Class: English 101

Cover letter

Dear Reader.

Many people think of language as a single structure that is only supposed to be spoken in a single way. But in reality, a single language can be divided into different structures which can consist of broken, accent, and dialect. In a population where the majority spoke the most common version of a language, they often created an invincible line of division. In my essay, I have researched the effect of language and literacy on the daily lives of United States residents, and used different varieties of evidence in my essay.

 As humans, we use language and literacy everyday to communicate different sort of negativity of the society with one another. But people really forget to discuss the negativity associated with language itself, which is part of the forces that guided my mind into choosing the topic “How have linguistic and literacy barriers harmed America and its residents?”. The world will discuss almost everything but they often do not discuss language and literacy too often. 

To understand and fully digest my investigation essay, one must fully understand some key words I inserted into my title “How have linguistic and literacy barriers harmed America and its residence?”. This title can be broken down into “language and literacy”, “effects”, and “america residents”. To me, I think it is very important for the audience to notice I said American residence instead of American citizens. This is because American residence includes everyone who lives in the United states, including immigrants who are yet considered citizens. This essay is filled with facts that are supported by peer-reviewed article sources.

The challenges  faced while writing this essay was that it was very hard to find a scholarly article that completely focused on the negative side of language and literacy. Most of the articles I found mostly focus on people learning English in the educational system, especially those of children who are still learning to speak. While the challenges made my essay educationally challenging, I also had some fun and strong areas that kept my essay on point. I was able to gather every information we discussed in class that may be useful to my work. Then I turned those information into ideas which I used to start off my paragraphs.

How have linguistic and literacy barriers harmed America and its residence?

The United States of America is a lovely country that accommodates immigrants from all countries around the globe. Many of these immigrants in the United states are often here because of one reason or the other. According to the US immigration law center, it is said that Some immigrants flood into the US because of better education, escaping hardship, political asylum, opportunities and many more. As these people come from different backgrounds escorted by their different language and literacy levels, it’s quite ironically compelling that people looking for better opportunities might be faced with a new set of challenges which may end up taking away the opportunities they have made so much sacrifice to achieve. A linguistic question dealing with cause and effects requires critical thinking, if one is to take a strong stand. Linguistic and language barriers is a natural force of occurrence that denies people of different accent and dialogue within a language or completely different language the opportunities they very-much have the right to achieve. The negative effects of linguistic barriers can be demonstrated on every sectional level that nature might envision. I strongly believes that Linguistic and literacy hardships are a part of a bigger system of language and literacy discrimination, which denies people’s different opportunities like job opportunities, healthcare opportunities, education opportunity. As a matter of fact, people who don’t fit well into the social level of standard English are downgraded in almost every aspect of life, because society thinks that the only way to be successful is through the standard English being taught in the educational system.

For starters, it might not be obvious how language and literacy barricades have harmed people. As part of a social cause, the standard of English the public requires people to speak just makes it absolutely hard for people who don’t perfectly fit into “standard english” by definition to be left out of social socialization. The point of view about language and literacy effect will also be studied through the scope view of two individuals, Amy Tan, and Safwat Saleem who use different methods to collectively communicate the harm of language and literacy on human confidence. Amy Tan is a first generation Chinese American writer. She wrote about her personal opinion of the English language and how it differs in different countries where English is spoken. Her personal interactions with her mother influenced her personal opinion. In her essay titled “Mother tongue,” Amy Tan discussed the language and literacy challenges that people around the world face. In particular, she provides an instructive analysis of her mother’s experience with linguistics discrimination in the United States of America, and she discusses how her mother’s level of language and literacy affected her socialization with people. There was a point where Amy’s mother went to the hospital for a follow up on a possible brain tumor, and when she got there, her mother spoke to them and they did not apologize when the hospital lost her scan result. The hospital “… did not apologize when they said they had lost the CAT… they did not seem to have any sympathy…” (Tan) Therefore, Amy’s mother insisted on the hospital speaking to her daughter, which they did call Amy, and the hospital “assurances the CAT scan would be found, … and apologies for any suffering…” (Tan) caused the mother. Still how does language and literacy affect Tan and her mother? What is the relationship? According to “mother tongue”, Tan mother speaks broken English and could not compete on the same standard as folk communicating with standard english. Therefore many people use that opportunity to limit her by making her think she is not capable enough to represent and express herself. On the other hand, Safwat Saleem is a pakistani- american visual artist. On TEDTalk, he discussed how he is constantly challenging the notion of normalcy by discussing how people were not very nice about his accent in the project he was working on. Safwat was working on an educational video about video games, and when he posted the first part of his accomplishments, the first few comments were encouraging until he started receiving hateful comments like “Could you remake this without peanut butter in your mouth?… Please don’t use this narrator again u can barely understand him”. (Saleem 2:42-2:56) Saleem was looked down upon by his accent. Society thinks his ability wasn’t good enough by judging his linguistic ability. Society has created a norm of normalcy that seems to hurt people who doesnt fit in the circlewhich is bad enough but in addition, they make them feel crazy and stupid for the way they speak.

Many scholars have spoken about language and literacy’s effect on people. Betsy A. Bowen and June Jordan are individual professionals at their craft work who have focused on different aspects of linguistics and literacy that may have devalued people’s chances of success. Betsy A. Bowen is the solo author who wrote a scholarly article about levels of literacy in the United state on a rate of one to five. She claims that there is a direct relationship between literacy and income of individuals which collectively contribute to the economic status of a nation. In one of her scholarly articles titled “Four puzzles in adult literacy: Reflections on the National Adult Literacy Survey”, she proved that  

Approximately 43% of those scoring in Level 1 lived in poverty; only 4% to 6% of those scoring in Level 5 did. Among adults as a whole, income increased consistently as literacy skills increased… In fact, all measures of economic success – rate of full-time employment, number of weeks worked, weekly earnings, and interest earned from savings ac- counts – increased as literacy skills increased… (318)

Betsy A. Bowen proved her claim with a survey given to people as a test to take which she then used the statistics gathered from the literacy test conducted by herself to make a pattern. The purpose of her research is to educate the reader on every aspect of literacy she has tested people on by laying down the statistical facts she has gathered. Unlike Betsy who uses logic to prove the effect of linguistic and literacy discrimination, june jordan is another interesting female individual who wrote about experience, and uses her class lecture as example in her writing. June Jordan was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist who is widely known for her exploration of global issues like gender, immigration, race, and representation. She wrote about how “White standards of English persist, supreme and unquestioned, in these United States. Despite our multilingual population…” (Jordan) and diversity in the country. Depict the land belonging to the native americans, with different variety of their native languages, standard English have now come to be previewed as the language that undo other languages because “White standards control our official and popular judgments of verbal proficiency and correct, or incorrect, language skills, including speech”. (Jordan) . June Jordan’s writing brought to light about the rare fact that standard English is wiping out other languages out of existence. This is an obvious effect of language wiping out other languages, but people seem not to realize it because we paid no attention to language and literacy.  

In conclusion, I have come to believe that language and literacy discrimination have hurt our society in many ways that we can imagine. Some of the negative effects are directly caused by language and literacy while other demerits happen indirectly. One big issue of  Language and literacy is that it not just takes away opportunities from people, but also serves as a force of separation among people. For example, people who received education from an English speaking continent like Africa found it harder to use their graduate educational level to find a better job in the US because the educational standard English system in the United states does not permit them. Therefore, the supremacy of Standard English hurts people due to the fact that it makes other languages, and dialects look useless.

Work Cited Page

• Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue.” Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers, edited by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford, 7th ed., Pearson, 2010, pp.34-44

https://www.umsl.edu/~alexanderjm/Mother%20Tongue%20by%20Tan.pdf

• Saleem, S. (2016, July 7). Why I keep speaking up, even when people mock my accent [Video]. TED Talks. https://www.ted.com/talks/safwat_saleem_why_i_keep_speaking_up_even_when_people_mock_my_accent?utm_campaign=tedspread
• Bowen, Betsy A. “Four Puzzles in Adult Literacy: Reflections on the National Adult Literacy Survey.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, vol. 42, no. 4, 1998, pp. 314–23. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40013518. Accessed 29 Nov. 2022.
• Jordan, J. (n.d.). Nobody Mean More to Me Than You And the Future Life of Willie Jordan – English 110 to Clone. https://engl110ccny1.commons.gc.cuny.edu/content/june_jordan/