Tan, A. (1996). Mother tongue. In W. Martin (Ed.), Essays
By Contemporary American Women (pp. 32-37). Boston, Massachusetts:
Beacon Press.
I picked this essay by Amy Tan because the first time I read
it, a couple
of summers ago, I remember being moved by her conflict between
acceptance
in family and in the dominant society. After reading Delpit's
and Tatum's
books, I re-remembered the essay and the author's feelings.
Delpit, in
particularly, talks about the different types of discourse that
are used
in one's home/cultural community and in school/dominant culture.
She
talked about how these conflict and how the dominant society
does not
validate the home/cultural discourse. Amy Tan writes about
her
experiences growing up in the dominant culture and its schooling
system.
She must learn Standard English while at home she speaks a different
kind
of English with her mother. One point I especially like
that she makes is
that she does not like the designation of "broken" English.
She lets the
reader know and see that her mother speaks a different, yet very
rich and
expressive English. She tells us that it is not broken
and does not need
to be fixed. That really struck me as important and as
fitting in with
Delpit's suggestions to validate and allow students to exult
in their
different discourses.
Ms. Tan does not limit her essay to discourse but to her experiences
growing up in a dominant culture where being Asian American caused
teachers to automatically assume she was talented in Math and
should
follow a Math career and who steered her away from writing.
She talks
about how confusing English tests are that want word analogies
or the test
taker's opinion or judgement. She would find her analogy
selection or
opinion was not the answer the answer key wanted; she did not
think the
same way and thus came up with a different answer. Unfortunately,
her
test scores only showed that she didn't give the answer the key
wanted
instead of that her way of thinking was different.
This essay reveals a real experience in how the author tries
to adapt to
the dominant culture's demands for Standard English yet how she
learns to
exult in the discourse used in her home, by her mother, her "mother
tongue."
The rest of the book also has rich, revealing, emotional, and
thought
provoking essays written by American women of many cultures.
It is well
worth reading.
Questions:
1. What advice would you give a teacher so she/he could
better help and
encourage her/his students who are facing the same experiences/conflicts
with discourse that you did?
2. You say that although your teachers and bosses discouraged
and steered
you away from writing that your rebellious nature persevered
and helped
you continue to follow a career path in writing. How could
a teacher,
faced with test scores and work results, not inadvertantly steer
a student
down a path she/he doesn't want?
3. How can we help our students be proud of their cultural discourse
but
also help them succeed in Standard English so that they can perform
well
on mandatory evaluative tests, like SAT and others?
4. Like you describe doing in your essay, many children have
to be the
speaker/interpretor for their families. How can we make
it easier for
them and how can we help them not feel they need to be embarrassed
or
ashamed?
5. This is a general question for others, how are we going
to teach our
students to see that different discourses are not a sign of lesser
understanding or intelligence? that all aspects of diversity,
whether
discourse, customs, ways of thinking or seeing things, etc.,
are assets to
our society, to any society?
Submitted by Kirstin Siewell
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