Michael Centeno
Professor Schulte
English 11000
March 11th, 2021
Cover Letter Phase 1
Cover Letter

In the First Phase, I explored this class, and the topic it explores, the language of English, and its many variations. While I believed my English was pretty decent, (after all it is my native language and I’ve been studying it for about thirteen years now), I never explored the many variations that English has to offer. My audience in this Cover Letter is basically anyone who wants to read it honestly. Inclusivity rules! I learned about the variation of Black English, which was fascinating to learn about, as I have never heard of it until I took this class, and have learned about how the English language can impact many people of many different backgrounds, and how much the English language can mean to someone, which I never thought about until I took this class. An example of this is Amy Tan’s story, which I found to be very interesting. It was actually very interesting to explore how the English language has had such a big impact on other people in a way it never honestly had on me. I take the language for granted, and I haven’t really thought about it until I took this class.
One of the first assignments we had to complete in this class was to analyze Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue.” This was probably my favorite assignment of Phase One. We explored Amy Tan’s story of being a first-generation American, whose family was discovering a new language, English, and named the struggles that she and her mother had to go through while moving away from their native language of Mandarin Chinese and moving towards English. She talks about the different varieties of English that she uses. With people like her mother and her husband, she uses informal, broken English. That is the variation of English that she is most comfortable with. With other people, she uses the more formal, academic variation of English. Like most people in Gen Z, I am most comfortable using informal English myself. Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” really made me realize that I take my own mother tongue for granted. Another assignment that also had an impact on my literacy was Saleem’s “Why I Keep Speaking Up…” This gave me an entirely new perspective on an immigrants struggle to learn and speak English, and trying to establish one’s self in a predominately white nation with a non-white sounding name. As a person who is half-white with a white-sounding name, I really found Saleem’s perspective to be interesting. I never had his viewpoint before.
One course learning outcome that I have gained from Phase One was “Recognize the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and be open to communicating across different languages and cultures.”It is through the viewpoints of people from many backgrounds that I have learned new things, and I am a better man for it. English and language as a whole have a profound way of shaping one’s life, and I had never fully realized that until I took this class.

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