Paper #1 Text #1

 This text is a memoir of Mary Seacole because she reflects on her life events that took place during the 1850s in Jamaica especially death. After seeing many people dying including her love-friend, she realized that death has nothing to be scared and ashamed since everyone could finally bear; eventually she came over the fear of death after those situations had passed. Meanwhile, the story has direct narration from Mary Seacole herself because she was in that particular situation. It shows by the uses of “I” before sharing her story and thought, which means she actually involved in the events.  She also uses many little events occurred during that time to show the affection of yellow fever leading to the suffering because of epidemic. Every event, including the story of her friend, she mentioned relate to the death, which is an anecdote from what she saw and received during that time.  The dialogue for example; “Let me lay my head upon your breast”, is used to pull the audience in the situation, which gives the audiences experience by themselves, and makes the story awakes. Since this is a memoir to review and reflect on her personal experiences, the audiences can be everyone because it is only the life-reflection of one person. Everyone who is interested in what people reflect can read the story. However, it possible that the audiences can be people who follow the life of Mary Seacole, or people who wanted to read the story of the witness, involving in the spreading of yellow fever in Jamaica during 1850s.

The tone of the text is sympathetic because she regretted about the death of her young friend and people who were suffering from the epidemic of yellow fever. The atmosphere is bleak, sad and gloomy because people are not happy. They were struggling to be alive even though the deaths were very close to them.

 Since the text is about the struggles and suffering of Jamaicans community, which she involved in the events, during the 1850s when the country was greatly affected by the yellow fever. It shows the life of Mary Seacole and her experiences with the disease and how she loses her love and others who has close relationship.  However, Mary Seacole doesn’t only want to share her experiences, she is trying to say that there is a loss of every life. Everyone is going to die eventually; therefore, there is no need to be ashamed to fear even though death is always terrible. For example; “if I had never feared death, I had not learnt to meet him with a brave, smiling face, and this he taught”, the sentence implies that she used to fear of death before she met one man who teaches her that death is what not to be scared. She realized that even a man who almost dead still thinks positive with smiling face, so death is what she can bear.

Within the story, Mary Seacole perspective is objective from what she saw and received during Jamaican yellow fever epidemic crisis. She received new ideological about the truth of death of people. She realized that everyone is eventually going to die, therefore; death is nothing to be scared, and is what people can bear at some point. It clearly sees that she actually received new idea from the use of “I” in the text because it shows that she was in that situation. The use of “he” and “my son”, which refers to her friend, shows the close relationship between two characters. This supports the idea that she reflects her experiences from important event in past that she sympathized, which considered as memoir as well. Therefore the text is pulling the audiences in due to the uses of pronouns in particular relation and her perspective that led the audiences think along with her ideological.

The structure the uses is organized within declarative style and informal language. She started with wide and general event that occurred in the area to give audiences the ground information of what she is going to talk about. The detail is narrowing down toward each paragraph to focus on her main point of the story. She develops her idea from giving her thought.  Since she meets the point where she explains everything, she describes her experiences, which provides the audiences’ easier view of what she is talking about, supporting her thought and statement. Her language used is mostly to hook the audiences to her experiences because for example; “I must not tell you his name…”, it attracts the audiences wanting to know who the person is. It makes the audiences curious resulting that she’s trying to pull the audiences in. 

Written Task 1

Rationale:

            This written task specifically relates to the study of language and identity including cultural identity, focusing on the importance and relationship between language and identity including loss of language, identity, and lack of involving in cultural identity as living in the international society.

            After reading the article “Language loss, Identity, and English as an international language”, Adel Dastgoshadeh and Kaveh Jalizadah describe the importance of language linked to identity, and the loss of language which affect the way of perceiving identity and acquiring knowledge of our culture. They also address the issues of using international language, which will decrease the ability of acquiring different identities, cultural knowledge, resulting to the lost of knowledge, human history and information in particular race or ethnicity. Meanwhile, they remark that international language provides opportunity for unlimited information exchange. However, inequality in using language is a way loss of identity occurs. Hence, from the point they made, I believe that the lost of language, which most likely to be mother tongue, can be occurred within international society resulting to the lost of identity and culture knowledge.

Nowadays, Students will have to use English as a general language when studying and living abroad. I realize that first language is very affective in showing our identity and particular culture. However, how important and useful of first language is in an international society? Should we maintain our first language? How do we lose our first language? These are basic questions we hear. Hence, I decided to write a blog about student who studies abroad, experiencing these problems himself, because blog allows narrator to give some opinion about the experiences. Blog is intended to be personal experience blog. Therefore, it shouldn’t be other text type as newspaper, and the intended audiences will be general students and parents who decide to live abroad.

Written Task:

Blog:

Hello everyone, I’m writing from Abu Dhabi, where it’s burning hot today. In today’s blog I’m going to talk about the importance of dialect from what I experienced. In the part of my journey living as an international student, I’ve seen myself and many people living abroad, who are losing their identity when they lose their dialect. I know that being bilingual is beneficial because I can explore the world much better. Since I’ve lived in the Abu Dhabi, English always plays important role for me and everyone. However, is it always good to use English instead of dialect every day? And what is the importance of dialect in the international society? These two questions came into my mind when I experienced the lack of communication by myself.

Yesterday, when I talked to my mom about the celebration day of my country, I couldn’t express what I really wanted to ask because I forgot the specific vocabulary that explains the actual meaning of the event. Furthermore, when my little brother asked me about the symbol of my country king’s throne, I know what it means but I really couldn’t take the word out of my head. The word I said was every vague and meaningless; this is where my realization about using only English instead of dialect came out. Using only English gives me more problem than using both languages. Therefore, I don’t agree with using only English in daily life, but it is still important to comprehend English because it’s how you communicate in this society.

 As I’m living in Abu Dhabi, which is an international society, I realized that the importance of my dialect becomes lesser overtime. I have to use English everywhere and every day to communicate, to study and to live. Hence, I rarely use my dialect resulting that I sometimes forget vocabulary. Meanwhile, my mom also encourages me to use English with my little brother every day so that he can practice using English. This command implies to me that the importance of it almost gone. I have strongly feeling that we need to do something with this because why? It is because dialect identifies my identity and I still need dialect to communicate with people who came from similar culture. There are still national day and many important day celebrations where I spent time doing my cultural activities every year. I need dialect to get involve within these activities. Although English is important, as I’ve lived here for many years I saw many effects occurring because the gradually lost of dialect. The most obvious one is people lost access in their initial culture, and they are losing their true fundamental and identity.

When meeting new people in school, language is the first thing I used to identify people. I know who they are by observing their pronunciation, acting, and speaking style. Once when I was in restroom, I accidently heard other students gossiping their teacher. I was curious enough that I try to identify them by listening to what they said because it implies what gender, age and sometimes nationality from the sound expressed. However, I couldn’t identify efficiently because they are using English. I could have identified them more efficiently if they had used their dialect. Since in each dialect has unique expression in its own, it clicks in my head that dialect plays important role in identifying people’s identity. Furthermore in my English lesson, teacher said that we will lose our human historical and unique knowledge if dialect is disappeared, and this problem mostly happens with young people.

Once I worked on my CAS in primary school, I’ve seen many non-native English speaking kids, who supposed to have their dialect but they were born and raised within international society, using English as primary language. Then, the question came directly into my head. Oh!! What will happen with their dialect and identity?

In my opinion, the kid will not have opportunity to study an actual dialect, which leads to the lost; because of environment around them is international society. It wasn’t surprise that my opinion was true because I’ve seen kids in primary school can only speak one language. Although the kids have dialect, they only speak English with their parents. With losing dialect, kids will not be able to access their fundamental culture. They will not gain various and unique perspective from their home country because of lack of communication, which occur when losing dialect. Furthermore in my English lesson, my teacher said that when losing dialect, the initial identity also lost, and changed to new identity.

It is indeed that their identities deviate from the original. I observed Cambodian kid in Primary school, who supposed to familiar with Asian lifestyle and culture, but the kid is living with European lifestyle. In this case, his cultural identity changed by living and studying in the international society. He bought European food, such as bread and sandwiches, instead of rice or noodle for many days. I know this is a simple observation. However, another observation is that he tended to stay and talk with European students rather than Asians. This shows that losing dialect and having new language are affecting identity. He might be able to get negative responses when trying to access his actual culture because the networking and social relation is cut due to the lost of dialect. With this observation, I can say that the changes in language are also losing in initial identity to another identity.

I think, it’s been a long day now. Being bilingual who live or study abroad is good and beneficial because you can explore the world much better. However, consideration about maintaining our dialect should be kept in our mind because the effect of losing dialect is huge. Identity can be deviated or lost, and access to community and culture can be a lot harder. Therefore, dialect is important.

Language and Technology

Texting by David Crystal and TED talk by John McWhorter

There are many similarities and differences, in theories of how technology impacts language, from John McWhorter and David Crystal.

Firstly, the most important thing is that both authors believe texting or textspeak does not decrease the ability of using ordinary language. They state that textspeak is a way of writing that young people are developing, and needed ordinary structure of language adapted into another form of written language using imagination and creativity. Textspeak is developed by, mostly, phone-using young people who try to suit language within particular situation when texting. In texting, they also state that textspeak has lost its structure by ignoring the importance of punctuation and capital letter, but it has been given new function or use instead to express emotion through texting. Meanwhile, they believe that complex abbreviation is used between close relation recipients in order to convey information when abbreviating efficiently otherwise the meaning of abbreviated word will be changed into, perhaps, negative way. Lastly, both authors believe that the textspeak will exist and evolve along the time.

Within two theories, there are some differences that both authors believe.  David Crystal believes that textspeak has evolved into another kind of language, but John McWhorter believes that textspeak is fingers speech, which speech is one of the existed kinds of language. David Crystal

Blog Post #4

Cultural Appropriation

As an Asian, I disagree that the song “Hello Kitty” from Avril Lavigne is racist.

The video was filming in Japan which apparently shows the culture of Japan, not all the Asians. The culture in each Asian country is different, which have its own stereotype and cannot be fixed with all culture.

The costume appeared in the video that looks fancy and colorful is a usual way that Japan teenage wears. I agree with this statement that “picking and choosing pieces of a culture and wearing them for kicks like a hilarious Halloween costume, then discarding them with it’s no longer fun and going back to comfortable white celebrity  life”. The costume will be discarded when the video is done because celebrity has to create new project and work all the time, but it is not cultural appropriation. The video was made to attract viewers which needed to express the image and environment regarding to the song title and lyrics. Meanwhile instead of thinking as culture appropriation, I think Japan sees that it is good opportunity to spread their culture and image through celebrity and their song because they, themselves, are the one who came up and created this image of their teenage life which is known as “kawaii”. Japan always comes up with new weird fashion style, selfing act and their kawaii language which they will definitely and glad if someone is follows or uses their style.

With Asians characteristic in society, I agree that “Asian characters in cartoons often have slanted silts for eyes. That’s not what Asian people actually look like”. Most of Asians indeed have slanted silts eyes including Japanese, but not all Asians. However, I can say that the reason that they create Asian character having slanted silts eyes because they wanted to clearly indentify the character by the first impression. In the other hand, not all the cartoons create slanted slits eyes Asian character. It depends on the type of cartoon, created location, and the intention of the author. The cartoons is not “what to be fixed with one structure”, you can still find a lot of Asian cartoon without slanted silts eyes character. I think it depends on the audiences, and how you choose to consume the media.

There are many way to analyze and consume media which you can consider. The statement that “….parents don’t analyze their media consumption through the lens of critical race theory. (Those kids are probably downloading “Hello Kitty”….) is relatively racist to the song and parents. Each parent has their own way of analyzing and providing media to their children. “Why do you think that Hello Kitty is inappropriate for others’ children?” parents might think that “Hello Kitty” is not bad and not considered as cultural appropriation for Asian. They might think that the song is for relaxing or fun only. “What if they listen to the music only”, do you still think that the song is considered as cultural appropriation. I can say that there are many ways to consume the media which cannot be fixed. Parents from different places might think that “Hello Kitty” is adorable by representing Japanese Kawaii style. Hence, I think this statement is inappropriate in the article.

As we know that Asians is not the population in only one country, many countries combine into Asian. Hence, we all have our own thought about the media. Media appropriation cannot be fixed in one thought, which in this case “Hello Kitty” is not considered as cultural appropriation.  I disagree that “Hello Kitty” is one of the cultural appropriation for Asian because it illustrate the culture of Japan only. 

Link to the article: http://www.xojane.com/issues/thanks-avril-lavigne-now-i-have-to-explain-cultural-appropriation-to-my-asian-american-kids-again