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Tan utilizes “standard” to describe the form of English she learns and uses at school. Standard English adheres to traditional grammar and punctuation techniques in both writing and speech. It is, in other words, the form of English that is taught in American schools.
Standard/Standardized Quotes in Mother Tongue
The Mother Tongue quotes below are all either spoken by Standard/Standardized or refer to Standard/Standardized. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Mother Tongue
Quotes
And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her […] —a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.
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It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken,” as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I’ve heard other terms used […] But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions of the limited-English speaker.
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Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgement call, a matter of opinion and personal experience.
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Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me.
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I wrote what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language.
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Standard/Standardized Term Timeline in Mother Tongue
The timeline below shows where the term Standard/Standardized appears in Mother Tongue. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Mother Tongue
...her daughter speak with such a professional tone. The speech was heavy, and “burdened” with standardized forms of English; a language Tan associates with school, not her mother.
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...explains the type of English her mother uses. She reads and listens to media in “standard” English, but Tan’s friends can only understand a percentage of what she says. While Tan...
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...she suggests that her “mother tongue” and its effect on her schooling and understanding of standard English influences how she—and other Asian Americans—engage with American literature.
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