Madelyn Lopez FIQWS 101115 Ms. Crystal Rodwell 9/19/18 Becoming an American The concept of identity is concerned with the questions of “who are you?” and what it means to be who you are. It’s about the different experiences that developed you into the person you are today. Being in a new country and learning their main language is the biggest struggle someone could go through. Immigrating to a new country greatly influences a person’s identity. The challenges and struggles that come with assimilating into a new society can greatly change someone. I moved to the United States on December 14, 2009. It was the most unbelievable experience of my life. I had never been in an airplane before, so being able to experience flying in one was truly amazing. I was excited to arrive to the airport and see my family. When I got to the United States airport, it was cold and raining. We ended up traveling to our new home in a rented car, but I was still full of curiosity. As I glanced out of the car’s window, everything was so different. There were lights everywhere, tall buildings instead of houses, the streets were dirty, and I even noticed that a lot of the buildings had playgrounds in front of them. We passed by a street where people were dancing on the sidewalk blasting music. This strange new music filled me with so much curiosity that I found myself rocking my head back and forth. When we finally arrived at our new home, there was a group of people outside eating on the steps of the building listening to music, drinking and smoking. I didn’t know how I felt about this new environment at the time. It was then that I realized, everything, everyone and everywhere I went was going to be a new experience. I was delighted to be in a new country and experience all of these changes, but another part of me was not prepared for what those changes were going to be. Everything here in the United States was new to me, everything was different. My home, neighborhood and neighbors, and even the way everyone dressed was very different from how the Dominican Republic. The language people spoke and the way everyone went on about their lives was different. This was something that I had to adapt to with time, but, unfortunately, I did not realize how difficult it was going to be to adapt to all of this. Not knowing the main language that used in the United States was one of my biggest struggles and concerns. Back in the Dominican Republic I was able to take a few English classes, but not the kind of English one would expect from America. Learning English had to be my number one priority because to be able to be successful, strive and develop in this country I had to know their language. This was the first step to my assimilation into American society. I was enrolled in a new school located in Brooklyn, this school was really different compared to the school I went to back In the Dominican Republic. My first day of school was really difficult for me because I did not know anyone. To make things worse, I was late to class because I got lost and couldn’t communicate with anyone in the building. After arriving to this new school, despite not knowing any English, I tried my best to understand several things. I was in a regular classroom with kids that spoke a different language, completely lost in this environment. After a few days of being lost in the classroom, I felt distressed. It was a horrible feeling not having the ability to comprehend your surroundings. None of the students were able to help me when I reached out for help. Asking my teacher for help was not much help in the end because she could not communicate with one another. Being in a classroom where I was falling behind because of my language barrier was a struggle that took a long time to overcome During my time in this school, I was enrolled in a special program called English as a second language (ESL). This Program required me to be out of my regular classroom at certain times, so that another teacher could teach me how to speak and write English. This was the first step to overcoming my language barrier. This was very difficult for me because nothing made sense to me. When it came down to my pronunciation of English words, everything came out wrong. The hardest part of this program was being able to write in English. The teacher would test my spelling by telling me English words and checking my ability to write them down correctly. My biggest problem was that every time I heard an English word, I would write it how I heard it or how I would pronounce it. In the beginning I struggled to speak even the most basic words of English. It’s obvious that everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to learning English. Unfortunately, I was not doing very well in this program, every week the teacher would test me to see my progress and I would fail each of the test she would give me. The thing about this program is that if you show that you are making good progress, eventually you will be out of the classroom. It was not until I gained some confidence in actually speaking the language and being able to write in a basic manner that I began to overcome this problem. This helped me gain a piece of myself and take one step closer to becoming American. Experiencing this language barrier at such an early age has taught me to be independent. I had to be able to do things on my own rather than depend of others for help because there will be times where someone will not know how to help you and you are going to have to figure it out on your own. This also taught me to motivate myself and to have self-confidence because I realized that I had to work harder than others to reach a certain level in school. This has showed me so much because knowing two languages is important and useful for jobs and any other opportunity I get in life. The path to becoming American is a difficult one. It impacted so many different aspects of my life, like school life and my overall environment. These changes helped me become the persevering, hard working women I am today.

Madelyn

Introduction

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Madelyn Lopez                                                                                 11/26/18

                                           Portfolio Self-Reflection  

    The writing processes for all of the essays I have written throughout the semester was a challenging journey. The essays that I wrote were an identity narrative, a descriptive,  a critical analysis essay. Many challenges came along the way when writing these essays, one being to make sure that my essay had a proper flow to it. All the information I am putting down is making sense to my reader, and that the information is relevant to the topic. In addition, turning my thoughts into actual writing that makes sense is also a challenge that constantly shows up when writing my essays, because I did not know how to organize my writing. The use of revision and editing has helped me refine my writing.

    For all of the essays, I changed the structure multiple times. For example, in my identity narrative essay I was writing about two moments that shaped my identity, migrating to America and being bullied in school, I was supposed to write about one. This caused my readers to be confused because I was going back and forth between two moments in my life. My ideas were all over the place, so I had to move them around to places where they made more sense.

   In my descriptive essay, most of my paragraphs were disorganized because I had too many topics in one paragraph instead of breaking it apart. I was describing my mother’s looks, smell and the way she acts all in one paragraph. After I broke up these topics into different paragraphs, everything was well structured and was making more sense than before.

   I had the same problem when writing my critical analysis essay, the first body paragraph of my essay had too many topics inside. I was talking about vouchers, extracurriculars, class sizes and many other topics that did not all go together. I fixed this mistake by taking out some of these topics out of the first paragraph and making it its own paragraph where it would make more sense. For instance, I had to put the class size topic in its own paragraph, where I was able to find evidence to support and analyze that private schools having smaller classes is a good thing. Separating these topics into different paragraphs gave my reader a better understanding of the point I was trying to get across, instead of having to jump around to different topics.

   My peer review group played a big role in helping me find the solution to the mistakes all of my essays had. They helped me by writing down comments and suggestions, such as where transitions words could be added, grammar mistakes, irrelevant information, where evidence was missing and lastly, where more analysis could be added. Everything my peer review group added to my paper was extremely helpful in making my essays better. In most of the essays, I lacked transition words, this disrupted the flow of  my essays . Instead, I added some of the transitions words my peer review group suggested where they were extremely needed. I added words like, for example, for instance, in contrast to, as a result etc. They helped me developed strategies that were helpful in my editing and revision process. Some editing strategies I learned with my peer review group were keeping an error log. This helped me identify the problems with my paper in an organized way. This also made it easier to find common mistakes in other essays because I already knew the errors I was looking for. In addition, I learned to review my paper for one type of  error at a time. This strategy helped me looked at my essays in an organized matter because I was only looking for one error instead of looking for many at a time.

   These revisions and editing strategies that I developed throughout this course, I was able to share with the rest of  my classmates during the presentation I had to do. This was an important topic to discuss because revision and editing are two major factors that should be used significantly, before turning in your final draft.

  Overall, I learned a lot from writing all of these essays. I came across many learning outcomes, one that specifically focuses on revisions and editing. Throughout these essays I had to a lot of both revision and editing. To start, I had to look over all of my peer review comments and suggestions to know where my mistakes were and figure out how I was going  to fix them. After looking over my paper in the perspective of my peer review group I was ready to begin my editing process. The first thing I did when I began to edit my final draft was fix my grammar mistakes. I added commas where one of my sentences were too long and I added periods to divide a large sentence that did not make sense together and where a new one had to start. After my grammar check, I began to do more research to fill in the gaps of where more evidence was needed. Furthermore, when I was done adding more evidence to support my point, I started to analyze my evidence in depth to break it down in the simplest way possible, so that my reader could have a better understanding of what the evidence was saying. Something else I edited in my final draft was, I shifted sentences from other paragraph into another where it made much more sense. For example, I took a sentence at the end of my introduction and added it to my conclusion. All of this taught me the importance of revision and editing and the effects that it has on the final paper.

   Throughout this class I learned that it is important to do all of the readings the professor has assigned. Eventually these readings will come in handy when you are writing a paper. I also learned  the importance of  time managing when it comes to writing a paper. For example, I never took advantage of all the time the professor gave me to do a paper, I was using to do doing everything last minute and this was something that I believed showed in most of my papers. This showed in a way that I was making minor mistakes that would have not been made if my paper was not rushed. The aftermath of me not taking advantage of all this time I had to write my papers, caused me to get low grade. For the future to avoid me making the same mistakes, I will start my assignments the day it was due to have a head start. I will also take the time out of my day to review my papers with caution and thoroughly so I can be able to fix the right errors.