Cover Letter 

A personal language experience that is most significant to me, one I can vividly remember was when I studied abroad in the Dominican Republic. I choose to write about how I struggled with Spanish, my parent’s native language and how it impacted my life during my freshman year of high school. In this personal essay I discuss the disadvantages I faced studying in Spanish, although raised in a Spanish speaking household, while growing up in Harlem. I describe how being able to relate and building relationship with my classmates became difficult due to our background differences. The reason behind this being because growing up in entirely different environments of multicultural influences, mostly American, I was indifferent to my peer’s entity. I target other immigrant students who like me, also grew up in American while having their own culture derived from their parents and how this may have caused a conflict of personal identity.

The main argument I am trying to get across is that although society may argue that knowing and speaking a certain tongue will make it easier for a person to relate, through personal experience I have found it to be the opposite. In my essay you will get a glimpse of how speaking the same language doesn’t necessarily allow you to fully understand where that person is coming from. Meaning just because two people know the same language their sense of belonging is not always attached to that language. The place where I grew up and the community that surrounded me, all had a huge impact in what make up who I am. For this reason, it was burdensome for me to open-up and relate in school, I felt that even speaking the language my classmates wouldn’t understand my content because I had unalike perspectives of our two worlds.

Link to Language & Literacy Narrative- WLLN Rachelle Perez

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