My first challenges as an immigrant in Seattle were adjusting
to the Seattle school system. My first month of class was frustrating because I
did not understand what the instructor said in the class room and she gave us a
lot of handouts every day. In that class, there were students from Mexico,
Vietnam, Honduras, India, Ethiopia, and Somalia. One of my biggest problems was
that I wrote really slowly and I always was the last one who finished the
assignments in the class. My pronunciation, listening comprehension, and my
reading were really poor, but my writing and grammar were not so bad. So in
order to improve my weaknesses on those areas, I have to start borrowing CD in
English at Seattle Public library, Reading for an hour a loud voice every
single day, writing down all the words that I didn’t understand and look them
up in the dictionary, and writing for 10 minutes without stopping in a journal that
my ESL instructor, Arleen William, encouraged me to do. After doing this for a
couple of months, I started seeing improvement and I was able to takeover to a
lot of classmates who had better listening comprehension than me, and wrote,
spoke, and read better than me. Since then, I have realized that there is
nothing impossible when one is motivated and has huge interest in something.