When I first arrived in Canada at the age of eight, I had to take an ESL class at school. Because there were so few students in the class, the ESL instructor acted essentially as a private tutor to each of us in turn. Ironically, because I was given so many more reading and writing assignments than my Canadian-born classmates, my facility with English soon overtook theirs. Within a year, my writing was so good that my teacher told my grandparents at the parent-teacher interview that I should be published. When I explained this to my grandmother, who didn’t speak English herself, she was very pleased; but she never acted on it, nor would my grandparents have known how. But imagine — a year ago I was obliged to take an ESL class, and now I had become so skilled that my teacher thought I should be a professional author! It was an enormous boost to my confidence and a huge incentive to keep on writing.
I think there were two factors that made my writings so popular with my teachers and classmates… » [Expand post] [Permalink]