Learning English: The Skills to Success  by Brian

Learning English: The Skills to Success  by Brian - August 2022 Scholarship Essay

Imagine not understanding anything your teacher or friends around you were saying. That was my life from ages six through ten because I was having difficulty comprehending English. I struggled because at home, I would only speak Vietnamese, but outside of that world, I would have to completely transition how I thought and understood things into English. Due to this language barrier, fitting in was hard. I came home crying every day, frustrated that I could not understand the other kids around me. Besides affecting me socially, I even struggled with academics due to not being able to properly read and do my homework. This led to an overreliance on my parents to translate everything from English to Vietnamese. Knowing that I wanted to change, I asked to be assigned to an ESL teacher. From that experience, I learned the importance of consistency, patience, and determination is in pursuing your current goals.

Consistency was one of the skills I developed in response to the challenges of learning English. Even though I wish I could instantly become fluent, the reality was taking one step at a time and consistently practicing to improve myself. In my ESL class, I pushed myself to learn one vocabulary card at a time at first. I started to learn phrases that led to sentences and then I was able to read books. Consistency became an important key to my success, despite my initial struggles in learning the language. 

As I consistently read books, I encountered difficulty in retaining the information, making it hard for me to remember key details in the story. My ESL teacher suggested slowing down my current pace of reading. In response to this challenge, I began to understand the importance of patience as another skill for success. In my pursuit of the mastery of the English language, I became impatient rushing through entire books. By taking my teacher’s advice and slowing down, I had retained more key details in comparison to simply reading the book with no information retained. I saw this skill translate into my academic work as I took the time to actively comprehend what I was reading instead of rushing through.

As I continued to improve my comprehension, I faced another obstacle with communicating with other kids my age. Since my English was still broken, I realized that others did not understand or would misunderstand what I was trying to say. This made it really difficult for me to socialize. This is when I learned the importance of determination. I decided to set time aside to practice common conversation and watch English-speaking shows. After a while, there would be some phrases that I could not say or understand. This was when I decided to set even more time to grasp this concept. I spent my hours at the dinner table constantly reading and trying to understand these phrases until I could make out what they meant. Determination is now one of the important skills that I have learned being a junior in high school and has led me to become more successful in my daily life.

Now after completing high school, I have used all three skills as I continued to pursue more ambitious goals like getting first place in the state championships or scoring the highest grade in a college class. Being that my next goal is to continue my education and go to college. College is very important to me because attending college would help me gain a wealth of knowledge and experience that you would never receive if you decided to skip higher education. With this scholarship, you would open new doors for me and my future.