Amy Tan Mother Tongue Language Analysis

In the articles, “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan and “Rhythm of the Caribbean: Connecting Oral History and Literacy" by Glasceta Honeyghan, the authors discuss different types of language styles that they grew up with. The authors discuss their difficulties and what was enjoyable to them. The articles remind us that working hard on what you enjoy will be worth it one day. In the article, “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, Tan describes what it was like growing up in an immigrant family in the United States. Tan speaks perfect English in front of non-Chinese people, but when she is around her family, she speaks Chinese English which is not the correct way to speak it. Tan speaks much better English than her mom does and therefore has to call and speak to people for her mom, because her mom can’t do it by herself. Tan has always been good at everything, but her lowest grade was in English. Tan always wondered why Asian Americans never took creative writing programs and ended up in engineering. Tan realized it was probably because the English language was limited or broken in their families as it was in her own. Tan ended up being a writer, because she loves the way words flow and rhyme and because she was a little rebellious and didn’t like teachers telling her she was a horrible writer. In the article, “Rhythm of the Caribbean: Connecting Oral
History and Literacy" by Glasceta Honeyghan, Honeyghan speaks about how she grew up in a Jamaican village and how they did not have a TV, internet or really anything to do, but listen to stories, songs and poetry. Honeyghan is now a teacher and feels that her upbringing makes her a good teacher, because she is able to teach her students that there are many different ways to express your language. Therefore she has a lot of experience that she can share with her students. In her village, every part of their lives had singing and poetry in it and Honeyghan loved the flow and rhythm in these stories which made her love to read. Honeyghan talks about rhythms in church, school, home, the village and even in death. The children all grew up singing and repeating versus. Honeyghan states that many educators and poets agree that poetry is beneficial to children, because it helps with understand concepts and becoming more literate. Poetry is making Honeyghan love reading and writing and it helped her decide that she would make a great teacher. She is now a professor. In the articles, “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan and “Rhythm of the Caribbean: Connecting Oral History and Literacy" by Glasceta Honeyghan, they are very similar, because both of the readings discuss how the author grew up in families where language was important. Tan grew up where Chinese and English were languages she spoke and she spoke those languages differently depending on who she was around. Honeyghan grew up in Jamaica where all they had was music, poetry and story-telling so she grew to love the way words flowed and rhymed. Both authors were inspired by language. Tan was inspired because of the difficulties she saw when her mom struggled with English and how Asian Americans were not thought to be good in English. Honeyghan was inspired by the way words reminded her of when she was younger and how she loved words and rhythms. In the articles, “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan and “Rhythm of the Caribbean: Connecting Oral History and Literacy" by Glasceta Honeyghan, they are different, because Tan had to learn English, because her first language was Chinese.
She also was not very good at English, but she wanted to prove people wrong that Asians could be writers so she kept working on it. Honeyghan had no choice, but to listen to poetry, music and stories, because she was poor and there were no TV’s or electronics. Both authors decided to go into writing for different reasons. Tan is proving a point and Honeyghan, because there was nothing else to
do. These articles were very interesting to see how people look at reading and writing. Tan worked very hard to be able to learn English and to be a writer and Honeyghan worked hard at becoming a professor so she could teach her students about the types of languages that she enjoyed. These authors are very different in the way they started with loving languages and very similar in how they use language in their careers.