Comments on Lu's and Rose's Essays...

Min-Zhan Lu's "From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle" made me both upset and angry. Lu learned two languages at a very young age. Her parents stressed the ideology of Western humanistic tradition and English was the primary language spoken at home. She also spoke a Shanghai dialect with the servants in her home. At the age of four she went to a private school to begin learning Standard Chinese. This is A LOT of learning for such a young girl, and to complicate things even more, she wasn't 'allowed' to speak English outside of her home. She had to live separate language lives. I can't imagine how this would affect one's learning, having to switch from language to language all the time. It would confuse your mind when trying to read and write especially. Specifically, when she was writing her report on The Revolutionary Family, she referred to the scene in the book that 'moved' her, which she also labeled the internal conflict. Lu struggles with her own internal conflict in life and language in relation to her parents, school, and historical changes in China. Towards the end of the passage, Lu speaks about her daughter and how she 'moves with seeming ease from the conversations she hears over the dinner table to her teacher's words in the classroom.' This is probably due to the less-stressed political standings many years later that allow her daughter to not face the struggles of hiding parts of who you are.

Mike Rose was basically saying in his essay that even though people suggest that 'the poor are intellectually or linguistically deficient or, at the least, different', the learner can still have something shifted in their conception of their task and change their overall performance, especially on multiple-choice comprehension tests.

---it's getting late and i've realized that i wrote a huge amount in the past accumulation of minutes...i'm done...g'nite...---