Excerpts from Selina’s Narrative
Selina came to Canada for her final year of high school after studying two years in an international high school in China. She was currently in the university language program, which she had to complete before she could officially start her undergraduate study. She was admitted to the program with an International English Language Testing System (IELTS) spoken score of 5.5 out of 9. Including her one year of high school study, she had been in Canada for a year and a half when I spoke with her.
Figure 2. Artistic representation of Selina’s story, created by Selina
Selina’s description of her artistic representation.
To me, Canada is a place full of freedom and opportunities, very different from China. I almost felt like I was being released from jail when I came to Canada. However, I couldn’t seize any of those opportunities because I could not communicate in English. The falling star in the painting represents the opportunities and also the hope that I want to grasp. If I could grasp just one opportunity, I am sure I could grow and see a bigger world. But without the ability to fluently and efficiently communicate in oral English, I can only watch that star fall in front of me.
Selina’s narrative excerpts.
Honestly, I feel happy about having another year of language study to re-learn the basics of English before I actually start my undergraduate program. However, my family feel the opposite. They don’t understand why I still need to study English after a year of studying in Canada. When I told my mom that I needed to attend the university language program, she asked me, “Why do you still need to study English after studying English for so many years?” It was saddening and upsetting when she asked me that, but I could not explain to make her understand. My parents just kept asking, “You are already in Canada where everybody speaks English. You are already using and speaking English all the time. Why is your English still so bad after more than a year of studying abroad?” They do not understand that I actually don’t have many opportunities to speak English in Canada. What they also don’t know is that I am afraid to speak English in Canada. They feel that they have already provided me with the best studying resources and sent me to an English-speaking country, so the reason why my English is still not proficient must be that I am not working hard. They cannot comprehend how hard it is for me, as an international student, to study in another country in a language that I am not proficient in. I felt my parents would never really understand no matter what I said, so I just stopped explaining.
Although I am attending language courses, those courses are mainly about grammar, and I do not find them very helpful for my oral communication. We only have two sessions of spoken English per week, which is not much. Although I find the content regarding the sound system of English that is occasionally covered in the spoken class extremely useful, it is not enough for me to improve my oral English to a level of communication confidence. Firstly, it is not systemically taught, probably because the teachers are all native speakers, so they do not perceive the foundations like phonetics as something important, and they only pick out some common mistakes with examples. Also, I think the approach by which native speakers acquire the sound system is very different from second language learners. Frankly, I feel English native speakers don’t really understand basic phonetic sounds very clearly. Just like when people ask me about Chinese pronunciation, I probably would just stammer. Therefore, it is actually difficult to learn the very basics of the pronunciation from native speakers.
