Wednesday, May 16, 2012


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.