LANGUAGE BARRIER

This past school year I helped a foreign exchange student at the local high school survive English II. The hardest aspect of improving her English was filtering through the American slang. If it weren’t for phrases like: “Hootchie hoodrat” and “Stepford Barbie Dolls,” which she encountered in one book she had to read, her life would have been so much easier. Mine, too. Try explaining those two terms…to ANYONE! Once she started on a Steinbeck classic, reading was less of a pain. I’ve read Of Mice and Men probably 15-20 times, as I used to teach it to my senior communications class. Even though the characters use bad grammar and swear occasionally, that’s a cinch compared to interpreting Ghetto Speak and Valley Speak.

I admire any teen who would come halfway around the world to experience life in these United States. Wrestling with language issues aside, there is absolutely no way I could have done the same when I was in high school. I would have been too homesick for my friends. God forbid if I’d missed out on prom and being in Pep Club and acting in plays and chasing guys whose language I understood, all too well. Why, I never could have given up all those everyday hootchie hoodrat activities that American teenage girls enjoy!