sample essays

Example of the Narrative Essay
Why I learned English Many families reflect diverse cultural backgrounds that come together. My family’s roots are intertwined with several ethnic and cultural backgrounds. My mother’s parents are American, but her ancestors are originally from England and Germany. My father’s mother is Peruvian, but his father is Egyptian. I grew up in Peru with my parents in a quiet neighborhood of Lima. My paternal grandparents lived down the street from us, but my maternal grandparents lived in the United States. Unlike most non-native speakers, I did not learn English for school; I learned English so that I could speak to my grandparents. Coming from a multilingual family sparked many difficulties in communication. For example, when my maternal grandparents would fly from North America to South America to visit us, my mother had to translate among the different family members. We spoke Spanish in our house, but my American grandparents spoke only English. Since they did not speak a word of Spanish, my mother was constantly interpreting questions and answers. Rather than enjoying their visit, my mother had to work as a translator. With my mom’s help, I could understand my grandparents, but I wanted to speak to them by myself. Eventually, this situation reached its boiling point. One day my mother asked my grandmother to pick me up from school. My school was only a few blocks from our house, but my grandmother got horribly lost on the way. She ended up in the wrong neighborhood and had to get help from the police. It was quite embarrassing for a grown woman to find herself lost in a small neighborhood. Now we all realized that being monolingual was a huge handicap. In addition, it was potentially dangerous liability! Because of this incident, I decided to take action. The next time my grandparents came to visit, I taped vocabulary cards on all of the objects in our house. On the silla, I hung a card with “chair” written on it. On the