English: an alternative view of the world
From an early age, the art of language, whether through reading, writing, or English classes, had never been my interest—it felt plain, as my classmates complained: why do I need to study a second language when I can use a translator? When I was in primary school learning ABC, they said studying English is crucial because it is a bridge to the world; those words seemed so convincing, yet so far from me. I thought time would give us the answer, but what I was waiting for were endless exams, so then they said you could forget what you had learned, but not before the final; it was convincing but not a permanent answer. Time flies, we are no longer studying in the same class, but the answer is unresolved and even evolved. I am questioning myself: why am I writing this 5-page essay word by word, painstakingly, instead of leaving GPT a few prompts and then leisurely brewing an espresso? As I am contemplating, thinking back the experiences and memories I had, the answer gradually emerges.
I absent-mindedly scrolling through my phone, an advertisement caught my eye: TEACH YOUR KID CHINESE TODAY FREE ONLINE CLASS. I was at first confused, what on earth is happening that I had a chance to see this? Then suddenly I had a flashback—It was the time that my parent saw something similar in China, and I was coerced to be put into a class with other victims to study an alien language, called English. While showing my empathy to our unfortunate fellows from different racial and ethical backgrounds sharing the same fate with us, I somehow realized that their parents, or the education we have suffered, seems to put particular interests in teaching their children to learn non-native languages, regardless of their children’s preferences.
From the perspective that I now have, it would seem sarcastic for a child like I was to understand the benefits of manipulating a language from another culture and the purpose of my parents to put such a burden on me. However, understanding them has never been the teaching objective of those for-profit educational institutions for us, but for those who have money in their pockets. Those institutions had specific speech skills that were very effective in persuading parents to buy the class for their children. They pulled out the statistics showing polylingual has x percent higher income than monolingual, children who have studied this course achieve higher performance in the general education of English, our honor students who took this class just got their master’s degree at some renown universities for which I forgot the name, etc. No parents want their children to lose at the starting line. “Come, and we’ll tutor your child. Don’t come, and we’ll tutor your child’s rival.” (Nast) In primary school, when almost all of my classmates were having out-of-school tutoring, I was one of the few who could enjoy the free time after school, and even so, people like me were getting fewer and fewer as the time progressed and we got to higher grade. While I was merely feeling a bit lonely, parents’ anxiety was growing exponentially as my “no-class friends” decreased. So, inevitably, I was half-forced to take an English tutoring class in the summer after I graduated from primary school, which was considered basic around my “competitors” who also take math, Chinese, physics, so and so, and my pride of whom didn’t have any tutoring classes, had gone.
Looking back at the nodes of my English learning, it is the only tutoring class I have taken. Like most students who had out-of-school tutoring, what I gained immediately was the confidence to slack off in the school’s class and still get a beautiful score on the exam. Meanwhile, like a drug, to keep this dependence to gain leisure in class, one needs to seek supplement of knowledge out of class and constantly pay for the tutoring, the elementary knowledge I obtain from the summer camp was far from enough to cover the course curriculum for English. However, I didn’t expect it to have such a long-lasting effect over my language skill—taking the tutoring was like putting a fish back in water, the class is a crucial factor in building my autonomy of learning English, and therefore, I was able to slack off in class every day until the day I graduated from high school.
It seems that the spark that ignited my passion for English came from my innate rebellious nature. The time I took that English tutoring was close to when Chinese internet firewall started to take broad action, many websites aboard, such became a 404. I was a rebellious kid, if the block down hadn’t happened, I would never gain the curiosity of those webpages written in another language. But now they took them away, I could not help myself to guess what they were. “Availability of technological tools alone cannot ensure the development of autonomy. But the ubiquitousness, openness, and free or low-cost access to today’s technological platforms (such as the popular Duolingo system) have created unparalleled opportunities for second language learning.” (Kannan and Munday) Although I wasn’t relied on platforms that were specifically designed for Language learning, it is apparent that the openness of technology and share of information have made language more accessible than it ever had been. With some elementary but systematically learned English I obtained from that tutoring class, I start to read those blocked webpages by interests, which are mostly tech news and programming communities. Since these topics were in my “expertise”, I had a larger lexical storage of those words appeared in the articles, even if I was unsure about the meaning of some words, guessing them in the context then putting them in translator to reveal the answer was such a pleasure, like scratching tickets. When I guessed it right, it would serve as an encouragement for gaining vocabulary and an approval of my “expertise”; when I guessed it wrong, the comparison of meaning between putting my assumption and the actual word into the context could sometimes left a deep impression on me. Anyway, those vocabularies I gained from reading “prohibited” articles in leisure time converted to the grasp of vocabulary required by course curriculum. Many times, when I opened the glossary page on the back of my textbook, those words didn’t seem like some random combination of letters, but located somewhere in an article, a specific sentence I read before. It was never the language itself that piqued my interest in learning them, but those content lied behind, transformed abstract to concrete, shriveled to alived, making remembering the language never a hard task for me.
Perhaps I could make a bold assumption here, that language as a system of symbols and sounds initially had no intrinsic value, all it’s worth was the things it carried. From the message of gossips between one and another, to a whole social construct of culture, identity, and heritage, the way that how we zoom from microscopic daily communication to the culture built behind the people and language in a broad sense, feels just like how I learn English. An initial push from a tutoring class that taught me how to gossip my friends with broader audience, by a chance enchanted by information in another language as an audience, and now writing this essay to share the perceptions I have gained from various contents. These contents are so deeply tied with a specific form of language, and therefore while inbreathing ourselves in the contents, our language also gains the unique ability to express sentiments, shaping my perceptions and thought in a pattern that it represents. Looking back to those questions and complaints I made in the beginning, my mind finally cleared. The reason I learn English has never been to obtain some glorious but superficial degrees, the increased salary as the number of language one masters, or to satisfy social expectations and get rid of peer pressures, but to learn to appreciate the beauty of poetry expressing a sentiment I have never felt in my mother togue, to be able to acknowledge different viewpoints that others try to hide from me, and to shape my own identity and confirm my standpoint by my own experience with languages. With these practices, I can walk out from the information cocoon and see the world differently.
Works Cited
Kannan, Jaya, and Pilar Munday. “New Trends in Second Language Learning and Teaching through the Lens of ICT, Networked Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.” Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a La Comunicación, vol. 76, no. 0, 10 Dec. 2018, https://doi.org/10.5209/clac.62495.
Nast, Condé. “The Larger Meaning of China’s Crackdown on School Tutoring.” The New Yorker, 16 May 2022, www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-larger-meaning-of-chinas-crackdown-on-school-tutoring.