Thursday, August 16, 2012
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About Me
- Olivier P.
- I am an English teacher at Collège Édouard Monpetit in Longueuil Québec. I am currently working on a Student project that will allow a group of Language Arts students to visit Lowell Massachussetts during the Jack Kerouac Literary Festival. I created this Blog to encourage a discussion on Jack Kerouac and the students` adventures "On the Road".
In the play, the characters have issues with English because they see from it a threat to their culture, they don't want to be assimilated. Us Quebekers have a similar problem when we have to defend our French against the English from the rest of the country and from USA.
ReplyDeleteThe poem is also about being confronted to a new language that is not only unwanted but also very hard to speek for Irishes. To show this fact in the poem there is a lot of words that are hard to pronounce and many alliterations who makes the reading even more arduous. In both the play and the poem the subject is about being forced to changed a language for another(from Irish to English)and feeling as an inferior.
As Beatrice said, both the play and the poem are describing a feeling of inferiority, because they are supposed to learn a language that is not theirs. They don't feel comfortable to speak it because it's their second language and it's hard for them to pronounce correctly, they are shy because of that and that is a good reason. I found that the poem was very realistic and seemed to describe the reality they were living at that time, with all the consequences when the students didn't talk english language.
ReplyDeleteThe poem and the play present the issue of a new language, English, arriving as a threat in Ireland. We can relate to this situation because in Quebec we lived a similar situation with the arrival of English in Nouvelle France, except that we were not forced to speak English but were exclude of society and important decision and we can see that nowadays, we still speak French when Irish don’t speak Gaelic anymore.
ReplyDeleteBoth texts are relating to language assimilation, to transform one to one other. I think I do fell the same as the others regarding this subject, to aim for the replacement of a language is just to aim for the death of a culture.
ReplyDeleteBoth author describes the fear of their culture and history disapearing.
It could have been like this in Quebec as well but the assimilation here was less radical and forced.
With the modern thinking of mundialization, more and more languages should be treatened like gaelic has been.
Like everyone said before me, the poem and the text have for subject: The language assimilation. However, an aspect that I found interesting is that the (victims), if we can call them like that, don't really fight against it or more like they don't have the choice. For example the schools were totally the important weapon for assimilation.
ReplyDelete