Linda Laidlaw And Suzanna So-Har Wong Summary

Linda Laidlaw and Suzanna So-har Wong wrote an article which addressed the difficulties found on the personal writing assignments. By using interviews and focus-groups date, Linda and Suzanna got to the conclusion that such assignments are challenging for students that come from diverse cultural background, families or life history. Many elementary teachers ask their students to share information about themselves or their lives. By using personal narrative, teachers assign her/his students to do projects such as “write about yourself”, “All about me”, “When I was born”, etc, which have created a problem for those parents and students that do not share the same cultural background or family’s composition. In the article, Suzanna shares a difficult writing experiences that she had to face in one of her graduate courses. Briefly, her small story mentions that she was terrified about school holidays because she will have to write about a personal holiday experience. Since, she is a Chinese-Canadian immigrant family, Christmas wasn’t a tradition or holiday for them. Therefore, she wouldn’t have the same experiences that her classmates had. She had to rely on creating fictional stories that helped her survived the terrific “what did you do during Christmas holiday.” Suzanna constantly will

A lot of students find themselves lying on this “write about yourself” assignments. Many students feel pressure because they need to narrate stories or events that aren’t part of their lives. Moreover, these students come from different family’s compositions or circumstances that won’t allow the student to share or provide certain information. This is not only a problem for the students, but also to their parents. Suzanna states in the article that these students that are culturally or religiously diverse can feel marginalized by these personal narrative