My First Meeting with English
Burak Karabal
Turkey
ESL 0200
In 1996 when I came to the United States with my parents, I felt very alone. I asked myself; why are you feeling bad while your parents are living with you? Because I knew this country is new for us and we didn’t know anything, that’s the reason I felt alone.
We arrived at JFK Airport, everybody was speaking English, and we couldn’t speak the language like them. Many months later, I started to go to elementary school in North Plainfield. My teacher’s name was Mrs. Fenner. At that time I couldn’t speak English at all. They started to teach me the English alphabet. I learned very quickly and Mrs. Fenner asked me: "How can you learn the language so quick?” I answered, the first reason is because I’m a child, but the most important reason is because the English alphabet is the same as my native language. That’s why I learned it very quickly and then I started to learn the numbers. First she taught me how to count from 1 to 10. I repeated the numbers and when I did wrong, she repeated the numbers again.
I remember my mathematics class in elementary school, when I told the teacher that I came from Turkey and I was learning English, he said: "You are going to work with me." He showed me a computer program and its mathematical game. He said to me when you answer all the questions correctly you will be done with the homework. If you want to stay in the class, you have to watch what we are going to do here. Every time I finished my assignment ahead of time in the class, he would give me more difficult mathematical questions to do.
One day, while I was studying in the class, someone came in and started writing numbers for the cafeteria meals on the blackboard, I was surprised because I didn’t understand why he was doing it. But the next day, I was able to understand why the person was writing numbers on the blackboard when everybody left for lunch. They picked a number and took a ticket and went to lunch in the cafeteria. I was very hungry but I couldn’t get lunch becasue I didn’t take a ticket.
The United States is a big turning point for me because I have learned a lot of things and I’m still learning at Kean University. I hope to improve my English more with the ESL 0200/01 course.