Dear Emma,
Living abroad may become a challenging process for someone at a very young age, specially if you have little, or not at all, vocabulary to defend yourself from. Yes, this was my case! My parents had the fantastic idea to take me (8 years old) and my older sister (10 years old) to live at Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, in order for us to live the experience for a time span of two years. You might be thinking that the reason we left was because of my parents job, but luckily it wasn’t. For my parents, two years was enough for us to learn English and grow up in a different environment to the Colombian one. If you ask me, the first few months were the worst. I literally didn’t knew a single word of the English language. I remember my teachers used to assign me a reading hour, were she paired me with a classmate so that they could help me with the comprehension and vocabulary. It was quite a task, not only academically but socially as well. Interacting with kids my age that didn’t speak my language, or likewise, me not knowing their language was not easy at all. Little did I know my shyness wouldn’t last long. As time passed, my process communicating with others had a remarkable improvement. It was just as If I was an American little girl. During my stay in Charlotte I made a lot of friends, most of them international friends. With them, we shared costumes for our original cultures and they would share theirs with us. If it hadn’t been for them, my english wouldn’t have been as good as it was while I was living there. Living abroad can be scary, but not taking the chance to assume obstacles, is just a waste of time.
ACADEMIC WRITING 