- Published: September 17, 2022
- Updated: September 17, 2022
- University / College: UCL
- Level: Undergraduate
- Language: English
- Downloads: 46
Experience with language barrier in travelling It was about 11 pm in Manama Airport awaiting my flight to Us from Kingdom of Bahrain which neighbors my home country of Saudi Arabia. I was not alone as my friend Shalan was also travelling along with me to study in US after winning the post-secondary annual oversees studies scholarship which is awarded by the government of Saudi Arabia. I happen to have arrived earlier than my friend out of fear of missing my flight as it has always been my weakness when it comes to holding courage on issues of flight and time. We were booked on a British Airline but the greatest challenge we both had was poor command at English as we could hardly understand basic words like gate, airport and quickly. We were a bit relieved to realize that the agents in the airline were from Bahrain and they told me to leave my luggage as I was taking my board to Minneapolis via Chicago which connected to London from Bahrain. This was quite a harrowing experience for a person like my Shalan and I who had limited knowledge of English language and we had great challenge when it came to understanding announcements on shifting from one gate to another as we exchanged flights across the different cities.
A few hours after arrival in the airport I heard the departure announcement for my flight in Arabic and hurried to the checkpoint for security check procedure. It here that I realized very few passengers about three or two were speaking Arabic language as the majority was internationals. My worry increased especially when I reached London and realized that only one person with a dark hair, little dark skin in his late of twenties I overheard speaking on the phone was Arabic speaker. I planned to speak to him and seek his help in getting my way out of the Heathrow Airport as we were going to connect to the next stopover. This was after I realized that the person seated next to me was an American after I saw him reading some book written in English. I had earlier in Manama tried to put everything in order and ensure all my documents were intact but I realized that one of my travel documents from London to Chicago was missing. I felt worried and could not settle but didn’t have a way of expressing myself to the English speaking American and so I simply stood and begun to behave in a manner suggesting I had a problem. Even the flight attendant did not understand me until some old man entered the plane with a son and helped in translating my problem from Arabica to the attendant and the American. It is after this that I got a surprising tap on my shoulder followed with a feeling of somebody pushing my face on the basin of water before I was handed the missing document after I nearly suffocated. I was relieved but it was a great experience of the language barrier and travelling challenges.
Work cited
Mora-Flores, Eugenia. Writing Instruction for English Learners: A Focus on Genre. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Corwin Press, 2009. Print.