AnnaMaria Pantelias

FYW

Prof. Roeder

8/30/20

English Language

In all honesty I’ve never thought about the English language or explored my thoughts on it.

However stepping back and looking at it from a bigger perspective I can appreciate it much more

that it is one of the major languages I speak at home. Last semester I went to study abroad in

Italy, and upon traveling to the many countries with my friends, we each said to each other how

luck we are to know english. Anywhere we went everyone was able to speak English, or at least

enough to communicate to us. The signs, the menus, the airports, everywhere you can imagine it

was always the native language plus the English translation right below it. It was like we were

spoiled. I can’t imagine being someone from Spain or Germany or any other place around the

world traveling to foreign countries not knowing the language, I would’ve been completely lost.

Then again, those people are probably able to get around because they know some English.

English, in my eyes, is a universal language, and I think its so unique and beautiful to see people

from other countries put in the work to try and learn English as a second language. English is a

hard language to learn and for anyone whose it isn’t their first language they will have an accent.

With that being said, the way they speak, their accent, will come out and show in how they write,

which isn’t a bad thing in my eye. The accents in many ways are a part of a person and represent

who they are and where they came from in a sense. It shows that English wasn’t their first

language, something they had to learn aside from their native language, maybe they learned at
the same time, or even later in their adult hood. Either way I think both are very hard tasks to do.

Therefore I strongly disagree with Stanely Fish’s writing about “ what colleges should teach”. I

think its important that the students learn about the world composition in writing because not all

English is the same exact all around the world. There is a basic English to go off of as a start, but

everywhere around the world its altered in the way they are taught and learn by the natives, so it

is good to try and learn their English they way they try to learn ours.