Week 1: Introduction

As someone who grew up with parents who speak "broken" English, I've definitely noticed how hard it was for my parents to speak English "properly." My mother went to ESL (English as a Second Language) classes for two or three years, but after a while she became too busy to drive herself to Chabot College every other day for class. My father never took formal classes because he's always been busy with work. For some reason, I remember thinking as a younger child that my dad's English was better than my mom's, but now my mom's English skills are definitely stronger. Was it the fact that she went to ESL classes and my dad never did?

Because my parents only speak conversational English, I grew up speaking only Mandarin at home and learning English as a second language only after going to elementary school. My experiences learning ESL are, unsurprisingly, different from my parents' because I was only about five years old and still in the optimal language acquisition period and went to school for almost eight hours a day speaking only English. However, I thought the struggle began when I had to start learning French in seventh grade. Watching my parents struggle to learn English throughout my entire childhood, I was prepared for a strenuous French journey. However, it wasn't like that at all. To my surprise, French wasn't hard to pick up. Because of Norman history with the English, French and English have many similarities; many French words are used in the English language (i.e. bouquet, ballet, à la carte). For Asian immigrants like my parents, those similarities simply don't exist, so learning ESL for them is stepping into a whole new world.

That is how this senior research project came to be-- I realized that learning ESL as an Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc. immigrant is difficult. The purpose of this SRP is to study components of Asian languages and English and compare them to find whether there are any differences or similarities that may bolster or hinder learning English as a second language for Asian immigrants. A huge component of this project will be interviewing and talking to immigrants about their experiences learning English as a second language and ESL professors and teachers about their experiences teaching ESL. Additionally, I will be reading on my own time about linguistics as well as attending ESL classes at colleges and education centers.

This topic is worth considering because more than one third of the population in Santa Clara County, California is Asian. The Asian-American population is the fastest-growing in the entire nation and for the 5.4 million of us who have come to in the past decade one problem persists: learning English as a second language (or maybe even as a third or fourth language). To tackle the problem, we must understand it-- that's the goal of this project.