Language Acquisition Experience

Running head : LANGUAGE ACQUISITION EXPERIENCE
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION EXPERIENCE
Name of the Student :
Name of the University :
Author Note :

1
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION EXPERIENCE
As a child, my parents emphasized more on vocabulary and diction rather than just
mathematics and science. I started reading Arabic story books and comics at a young age. Being
a curious child, I was intrigued by sounds of different words and languages that were not native
to my own country. My grandparents were monolingual (Piper,2018), as they were not exposed
to the outside world. On the other hand, both of my parents are bilingual (Ovando et al.,2018).
We have neighbors from different countries like the U.S., U.K., Turkey, Jordan, India, Pakistan
and many more. English was the lingua franca needed for us to communicate with people from
different ethnicity. In this essay I will discuss about my experiences of taking up English as a
second language.
In elementary school, we were taught simple words of various places. These faraway
lands attracted me as a child and I dreamt of visiting these foreign lands someday. I wanted to
know what did the people of these lands wear, what did they eat, in what language did they speak
in and how did they look like. One day, my mother told me that if I wanted to visit these
beautiful destinations then I have to learn their language, which was English. That is how second
language acquisition (Rivers,2018) started. In middle school, I remember our teacher teaching
us universal grammar and spellings. Most of my friends belonged to the linguistic minority
community and conversing with them in English helped me develop my language skills and
pronunciation (May,2013). My love for English as a foreign language developed in middle
school. I can recollect my father buying me second hand literature classic novels once a month
so that I can develop my proficiency better. The first ever classic that I read was Oliver Twist by
Charles Dickens. From then onwards there was no looking back. After that I read Mark Twain,
Lewis Carol, Roald Dahl, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Virginia
Wolf and many other prominent writers, poets and novelists. For me it was a discovery of a new