Multilingual self: Inspired by a recent trip to Peru

Funded by GATESOL, I had the privilege of presenting at the 2016 Peru TESOL conference in Arequipa. In this poem, I write about my inspiration of becoming fluent in Spanish by drawing on my interactions with and observations of locals and backpackers, non-native speakers of Spanish, in Cusco, Machu Picchu, Lima, and Ollataytambo beyond Arequipa during my extended 10-day stay in Peru. I describe how exhilarating it was to try out my limited Spanish and to watch crosslinguistic influences at work. In this poem, I write in all four languages of which I have varying proficiencies: Korean, English, Farsi, and Spanish in hopes to encourage teachers to allow multilingual students to draw on all linguistic repertories when learning in school (please see Ofelia García and her colleagues’ work on translanguaging). ReferenceGarcía, O. Wei, L. (2015). Translanguaging, bilingualism and bilingual education. In W. E. Wright, S. Boun, & O. Garcia (Eds). The handbook of bilingual and multilingual education (pp. 223-240).