Analysis Of Hunger Of Memory By Richard Rodriguez

A study at Johns Hopkins found that bilingual education teaches bilingualism without compromising English proficiency. Comparable studies have shown that students gain proficiency in the second language and outperform their nonimmersion peers on standardized reading in English. The Current Status of Bilingual Education Programs in Arizona In 2000, Arizona passed Proposition 203, which required English-only instruction in all public schools.

In the autobiography Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez the author employs the theme of higher education to defend his views on affirmative action. He shares his views and experiences on the issue as a minority alienated in a majority white American society in the 1960’s-70’s. Although he was a well–educated Mexican American, his ethnicity classified him as a minority. In college, despite being anti-affirmative action, Rodriguez still reaped the benefits of affirmative action. He believed that affirmative action should not be not be determined by race, but student’s intellectual ability to complete college.

Natalie Calderon History 240 Brian D. Behnken December 7, 2015 The Latino Threat The Latino Threat is a book written by Leo R Chavez and anthropologist who is a professor at University of California, Irvine in which he analyzed the threats that Latinos face in America by its society. In his book Chavez discussed that Americans assumed Latinos were a threat because of the stereotypes and prejudices that the media and many other sources had over them.

In the online article by Max J. Castro, Ph. D, The Future of Spanish in the United States, the author effectively uses his credibility to link facts and history of other languages to Spanish along with appealing to the reader’s emotions to explain why the longevity of the Spanish language is possibly threatened in the United States. In his article, Castro refers to a plethora of statistical information about Spanish as a language in the United States, including that it is predicted to be the largest Spanish speaking country in the world by 2050. Even today Spanish is by far the second most spoken language in America, second only to English. Although the amount of Spanish speakers is increasing, Castro also mentions in his article, largely concerned,

In writing, authors chose particular words and phrases to effectively convey their message or to engage the reader. Writer's word choices, also known as diction, can help communicate ideas, reveal emotion and opinions that they may have toward something or someone. There are many different levels of diction such as formal diction, used by Richard Rodriguez in his autobiography The Hunger of Memory, and neutral diction, used by Charles Bukowski in his novel Ham on Rye. The use of diction in these pieces make the stories come to life in the reader's head. Richard Rodriguez uses very formal diction in his autobiography,The Hunger of Memory, his words express his emotions and motives of being a writer.

Assimilation... assimilation is a word that I can personally connect to. Imagine moving to another city, town, or state. That’s hard to do right? It is unimaginably hard leaving everything behind. Now, imagine moving to another country where you don’t know their people, language, or traditions.

In his essay about being a bilingual student, Richard Rodriguez makes the claim that a family’s language is intimate. As an intimate language it is unfit for use in school or in public and that attempts to do so demonstrate a misunderstanding of the purposes of school and the intimacy of a family’s language. To create this argument, Rodriguez recounts numerous parts of his childhood to serve as examples to support his claim. Rodriguez uses some of his examples to state that English is a public language. In one segment of his essay, he explicitly says that English is the language of society when he says “for it is now the sound that of my society,” (Rodriguez 12) his society being Americans.

In the essay “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” by Richard Rodriguez. The author uses his memoir to show how he has fought through his childhood to understand English and how the english language had formed his identity. To him, Spanish was a private language, spoken only at home and in the comforting presence of his family. The Spanish language allowed him to connect with his parents because that was all they knew. However, After he was somewhat forced to speak English by the public, he became an outsider to his own culture, unable to speak Spanish, but still able to understand it as it states “we remained a loving family, but one greatly changed.

He supports this argument by telling his own story of being forced to learn English by the bilingual education system. The experience he had learning English made him experience great embarrassment, sadness, and change. Rodriguez concludes his experience by discussing how English had changed his personal life at home: “We remained a loving family, but one greatly changed. No longer so close;no longer bound tight by the pleasing and troubling knowledge of our public separateness.” By learning English, Rodriguez’s family is finally able to integrate into society without language barriers.

He later found the different between the two languages. For example, classroom language is the same as public language while home language is the same as private language. Rodriguez felt more comfortable in speaking Spanish, his private language, than English. Therefore causing him to not really participate or speak in class. Out of the blue, his teacher came to visit his family asking “ to encourage your children to practice their English when they are home.

The main idea of the passage was the struggles Rodriguez faced when he was younger, but more specifically his bilingual conflicts that arose when he moved to the states. He also discusses his heritage and how he coped or assimilated with the emerging conflicts. Which also included his explanation over the advantages and disadvantages of being able to speak two languages at a time, and also being expected to accustom to the american culture, but in his case it was more like it was being forced or imposed on him to learn and live by the american culture. This is proven when rodriguez states that due to an “accident of geography” he found himself in a predominantly white classroom with the children of wealthy and powerful people. He also goes on and states that while he was ecstatic or “astonished” to be in a new environment most of his classmates were “uneasy to find themselves apart from their families, in the first institution of their lives” (Rodriguez,

Raised all my life in Puerto Rico and then transferring to America was a great challenge. I had to overcome various difficulties in order to adapt to new ideas, cultures, and lifestyles. One of the obstacles I encountered was adapting to school. Since I was five my parents wanted me to imbibe the English language in order to have an exceptional future filled with opportunities, but when I arrived all my hard work in learning English did not seem to matter at my middle school. I arrived in this country thinking I was going to be in the most challenging classes and be at the top but reality smacked me in the face the first day I entered eighth grade.

Frank Smith, a famous author from the Cold War era, stated, “one language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way” (Smith 110). Several school districts across the nation have implemented dual language immersion programs in their elementary schools. With a fast-growing immigrant rate in the United States, being multilingual has become extremely useful to many U.S. citizens. Dual language immersion programs should be implemented into every elementary school curriculum because children in these programs acquire a second language, which helps them develop useful skills, become more aware of cultures around the world, and, contrary to the opposition’s claim, it does help students learn better in school.

Baker (1997: 215) added five more to these four types of bilingual education: general education with teaching a foreign language, teaching separatist, two-way bilingual teaching and bilingual teaching general. These types of bilingual education that takes place in our country for different reasons is the general teaching with teaching of a foreign language. First because the existing social situation is that of a majority language: the Spanish, and second because the Education Act does not allows us to opt for another type of greater outreach program. Once considered the types of teaching bilingual the question we ask is what is the best of all, are these effective? It has been suggested that the effectiveness of bilingual education needs

Increasing development of bilingual education and the evolution of language may be due to the population size, social, political, economical and personal requirements. Numerous researches show that learning a language can improve mental agility, it can strengthen brain, develop communicative abilities of invidividuals and strengthen and improve overall humans´ abilities and skills. The concept of bilingualism should be tackled because of the various definitions that are given to this term. Those definitions seem to share one basic element, which is the use of two given languages by a given speaker. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary bilingualism is the ability to speak two languages or the frequent use (as by a community) of two languages.