Assignment Prompt

Your assignment is to tell a story about your experience with language in a specific situation. An effective story does more than entertain: it reveals in an experience, an insight, belief, or value that you, or a community you belong to, hold about language and/or an aspect of your identity as a multilingual person.

Source: https://blog.iese.edu/expatriatus/2014/05/01/multilingualism-multiple-personalities-or-just-a-diverse-one

Rationale

How, why, when, and where we engage with language arises out of specific situations, or contexts. Looking closely at the social and personal elements of a situation can reveal how you experience language and how it has affected your identity. Understanding the context of a language-related event can help you critically reflect on how to respond to various linguistic situations and how to solve communicative challenges in the future. As a student attending an English-medium university program in a predominantly Spanish-speaking country, you may also consider the role of English in your own life and in society.

Strategies of Narrative as a Genre

This assignment is narrative-based and uses techniques that both “show” and “tell.” Specifically, you will describe scenes, people, places, and actions. Use of sensory detail, concrete specifics, figurative language, dialogue, and other storytelling strategies will strengthen your portrayal of your experience, serving as evidence so that your readers get to see in language what happens rather than merely taking your word for it.

In addition to a vivid portrait of the situation, you will reflect on, comment on, question, and speculate about what this experience means to you. Consider how examining and reflecting on the experience reveals some insight that serves as the central focusing statement or idea into how language functions (in society, in your life) and what impacts it has.

Options to Consider

You can follow one of several directions in focusing your narrative:

You might look at a significant event learning English.
You might focus on cultural attitudes toward English and other languages in your life, and explore how you have navigated some of those for better or worse.
You might focus on becoming bilingual or multilingual in a current subculture or group, learning the appropriate uses of language and gaining membership to the group as a result.
You might consider what it means to attend university (or high school, or earlier!) in an additional language, including how it has affected your education and/or worldview.
You might look at the language(s) you will likely use in a chosen career or field of study. You can look at how your past experience with language has prepared you (or not prepared you) for the kinds of language you will likely be asked to master.

Format Requirements

Your project should have an engaging title.
Your project should be formatted in 12-pt. font with 1-inch margins.

]]>