Week 5: Its all in the Family

I absolutely love reading A Step From Heaven. Honestly, at this moment I am not done with the book but love it so far. It is heart wrenching to read; I completely empathize with Young Ju. As I have mentioned before, my parents are from Mexico and I was raised bilingual. I connected with the character in a very strange and new way- not until relatively recently did I realize that my experiences growing up are similar to many other bilingual first-generation Americans. In schools, we learn to make connections to stories and characters but I never felt any connection with a character such as this.

Growing up bilingual is such a weird and undefinable process that effects every part of your upbringing. I especially like how the author mixes in new words with English words and does not define them yet we learn through context. As a bilingual student who learned English in school and only spoke Spanish at home, often times words heard at school would be completely new to me and I would learn their meaning through context.

Family Language Policy was discussed further in our other reading, Hyun-Sook Kang's article Korean-Immigrant Parents' Support of Their American-Born Children's Development and Maintenance of the Home Language. As I said before, I was raised bilingual. My parents were from Mexico and we spoke Spanish at home and English at school. As we got older, English would creep into our home conversations and eventually our sibling conversations became English and our parent conversations became Spanglish. I have always wondered what language or languages my children might speak. In a monolingual society it falls to the parents to teach another 'native language' to their children. I like how this study took every day things, like dinner conversations, and analyzed them to the parental ideals. Although children might feel ashamed or like outcasts because their 'family language' isn't like their classmates, we as teachers must realize how important language learning in the home is. I hope that parents of bilingual children continue to push their children to keep their other 'native languages' and force them to practice it at home. Being bilingual is a gift; I recognize that now and am grateful that my parents kept us in line even when we would retaliate.