EC-Literacy Narrative Writing Assignment

Name
Professor
Course
20 November 2018
EC-Literacy Narrative
Am Chinese student taking my undergraduate studies at a university in New York? Am in the third year now and adapting to the American classroom practices has been a difficult challenge that I am still facing today. It is a challenge that spans across all areas of my life, personal life, academics, and culture, social and spiritual life. I learned English as a second language since my elementary and high school days, but here the English language is at the center of my life, I need it not only for my studies but also to survive.
I can trace the source of my difficulty to my Chinese roots. First of all, the learning method, our teachers and the Chinese curriculum, in general, focused on vocabulary memorization, grammar, reading, and writing but gave little attention to speaking and listening. Due to the lack of chances to speak in and out of class, I learned deaf and dumb English. Also, I did not bother to practice speaking as by then I did not have any ideas or thoughts of ever traveling abroad.
During my first year on campus, I was afraid of participating in class out of two main reasons: I did not know how to engage and my fear that my heavy ascent or poor English will make others laugh at me. Some of my courses require group work and every member of the group has to participate in the discussions or presentations. Back in China, the main classroom activity was spoon-feeding. We did not participate in class discussions, we just sat there and listened to what the teacher had to say, all we had to do is to absorb what we were taught. Having different ideas and even speaking them out was heavily discouraged, and the students voiced their views would be attacked by others who considered it as showing off. We were supposed to keep the ideas to ourselves as it was not polite to interrupt lessons because teachers were the authorities of knowledge. Also, the Confucian philosophy says that showing off leads to trouble. Some old Chinese sayings discourage speaking out such as careless talk leads to trouble, shut the mouth and open the eyes and the less said, the better (Yuan, 5). I rarely participated in class, even when I was in a position to do so, because I was not used to it and that I considered it as showing off.
My strong accent too was holding me back from participating in class; I was afraid others would laugh at me. My fear was compounded when in one of those first lectures, one of my Chinese classmates was asked to answer a question. By the time she was completing her first sentence, some of the American classmates were bursting in laughter because of her strong accent. It was a very embarrassing moment, especially for me as I had the same kind of accent. I knew at some point I had to talk in class, but I was not comfortable doing it, afraid of being laughed at because of my accent or mistakes. However, I have been working on my accent, and it seems to erode slowly.
I remember one day the professor asked us to form groups of eight and discuss a topic. The discussion started well with the other classmates enthusiastic to give their ideas and opinions. But when my tur...