15 The Languages Where I Am From: A Literacy Journey

Students in introductory academic writing classes come from many different backgrounds, with different languages and skills. As Paulo Freire (1970) asserts, students are not blank slates; they come with prior knowledge and insights into language and culture. To celebrate the beauty of those heritages and to get to know my students in an introductory academic writing course, I have used George Ella Lyon’s poem “Where I’m From” (2010) as a writing prompt. After reading George Ella Lyon’s poem, I provide my students with a fill-in-the-blank template to write their own “Where I’m From” poem. I also let my students know where I am from using Lyon’s poem as a template:

I Am From Hola and Guten Morgen

I am from freeze dried laundry in the winter

     from Orion in a summer sky and the southern cross.

I am from an expansive vegetable garden

     and a lime tree right outside the kitchen door.

I am from the reading tree in the front yard

     whose branches kept secrets.

I am from raisin tarts and empanadas

     from Hola and Guten Morgen

     from Helen and Peter H.

I’m from erupt in anger followed by too long silence

     and from do as you are told and don’t ask too many preguntas

     from explore the world and creativity has no boundaries.

I am from “der Herr ist mein Hirte”

     and wooden church pews

     from holding your breath, staring at the clock, and

     sprinkling salt from the balcony.

I am from booming John and muted Agatha

     from peppermint cookies and outdoor asados

     from the dragon tattoo on my Opa’s arm

     and the Chinese passport he acquired to immigrate to Canada.

I am from the 1-inch doll named Diane

     my father got me when I had rubella.

I am from those memories

     faded and unreliable

     that continue to shape my present.

I tell my students about my language acquisition and include a literacy journey assignment as part of the course. My first language was a German dialect which had been passed down for multiple generations. Therefore, the German I spoke was mottled with idioms and pronunciations that sounded flat and unfamiliar to other German speakers. I learned English when I was 5 and went to school in Canada, where we lived at the time. As a teenager, I moved with my family to a German speaking community in Paraguay and attended a bilingual German Spanish school, where I had to relearn German with “conventional” pronunciation and grammar which bruised my mouth and my confidence and turned out to be more challenging than learning Spanish from scratch. I remember the frustration of an assignment that required memorization of a short Spanish poem. I studied for hours trying to recite words I did not understand. Code switching, or switching languages in a sentence or phrase in keeping with the cadence and style based on need or perceived need (Benson, 2001; Sitaram et al., 2020), was a common occurrence in my home, where we wove together English, German, Spanish, invented words, and various dialects. Code switching has been a familiar experience in our children’s lives as well.

I left Paraguay in my early 20s to study in the United States, where I relearned academic English. When my sister and her young children came to visit from Paraguay, our children fortunately all shared English as a common language. The neighbourhood where we lived in New Mexico at the time was very similar to my sister’s neighbourhood in Paraguay, where fences or walls surrounded backyards. During a game the children were playing, the ball flew over the wall into the neighbour’s yard. My then 6-year-old nephew scrambled onto the wall. Seeing the neighbour boy in his backyard, my nephew shouted in Spanish to the boy:

“Pásame la pelota.”

Because my nephew was accustomed to speaking English in his yard with his family at home in Paraguay, but Spanish with his Paraguayan neighbours, he transferred that knowledge to his new environment in New Mexico. We explained to him that our American neighbours did not speak Spanish and that it was completely fine for him to also speak English to our neighbours.

When we moved from New Mexico to Canada, our daughter was in Grade 7. Since we had not been successful in teaching our kids German or Spanish, we decided to send our kids to the French immersion schools in our neighbourhood to at least learn another language. The school provided extra resources for the late immersion experience, and our kids were good sports about starting school in a language in which they could not even count to 10. Their survival strategies felt familiar. One day our daughter came home with a 100% on a science test. The test required students to match words with their definitions. She had memorized the definitions with their corresponding words and was able to match them successfully to achieve a perfect score without understanding anything.

Since most of the kids going to French immersion schools came from English-speaking families, parent-teacher meetings always included the admonishment, “Your child should speak more French.” One time we were going to visit a newcomer family that came from a French- speaking country in Africa. We convinced our teenage son to come along as translator. He proceeded to have a fluent French conversation with our new friends. I enthusiastically relayed to the teacher at the next parent-teacher conference that our son could actually speak French and that the language immersion experience in school was indeed successful. The ability to speak more than one language expands horizons, vocabularies, imaginations, friendships, and always leads to more interesting conversations.

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References

Benson, E. J. (2001). The neglected early history of codeswitching research in the United States. Language & Communication, 21(1), 23–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0271-5309(00)00012-4

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic.

Lyon, G. E. (2010). Where I’m from. Georgeellalyon.com. http://www.georgeellalyon.com/where.html

Sitaram, S., Chandu, K. R., Rallabandi, S. K., & Black, A. W. (2020). A survey of code-switched speech and language processing. Cornell University Library, arXiv.org. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.00784.pdf

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Teaching Note

Writing prompt 1: Write your version of George Ella Lyon’s “Where I’m From” poem (Lyon, 2010).

Writing prompt 2: Write your literacy journey. Literacy skills can be about reading and writing but can also be about becoming literate in a skill like driving a car, cooking something, traveling to a new place, interacting with a challenging person, or learning a sport.