Mother Tongue Amy Tan: Mother Term Paper

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When she began writing, she chose to envision her mother as the reader because that was how she could capture the real beauty of language in its various forms: "I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts."

Amy Tan's essay is definitely an effective and powerful statement not only on variations of English and her exposure to the same but also on class and cultural discrimination that people encounter because of their inability to use proper standardized English. While the author has refused to focus on discrimination aspect in detail, she has effectively drawn our attention to this side of the issue. There is some underlying tension that one feels when reading the essay that directs our attention to the discriminatory attitude of people towards immigrants on account of their limited English. The essay also reveals the truth about cultural identity that immigrants have been forced to develop and adhere to because of stereotypical expectations and images harbored by Americans. The immigrant community has often suffered from stereotyping and has been forced to take up certain careers since that's what people expect them to do. However the essay clearly shows that immigrant community is no longer willing from suffer from such restricted expectations of them. They want to explore career choices like any other person would want to. The essay also effectively points out the biased attitude of people in the workplace while it subtly but purposefully attacks achievement tests.

While I certainly agree with her on other issues, I don't think achievement tests' example was really relevant.

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This is because achievement tests are meant to assess your understanding on English language and its complex structure, so I don't feel they are biased or they try to undermine the significance of variations of Englishes. They are definitely incapable of capturing the richness of different forms of English but they are meant to assess one's skills of standardized English and thus I found the example slightly irrelevant.

Apart from this irrelevance, I also found her observation and argument regarding conspicuous absence of Asian-Americans from English literature rather weak and flawed. Research shows and even common observation proves that children of immigrant families learn perfect English in high schools and by the time they graduate, their proficiency of English language is just as good as any other child while they fluency in native language suffers. Amy Tan herself is a good example of this. She explains in the essay that her English was clear and perfect and thus I do not understand how her performance on achievement tests could possibly suffer because of broken English spoken at home. Hinton (1999) reveals: "It is commonplace for fluency in the first language to decline as English improves, so that by the end of the high school years, children are at best semi-speakers of their heritage language."

Amy Tan's essay has its flaws but they lie in the area where she starts generalizing. The negative impact of broken English on her own English language skills might have been pronounced in her case but researchers unanimously agree that English language acquisition is not as difficult a task for immigrant children as it is to retain knowledge of their first language......

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