Search For My Tongue - Skills Check Prep

(Style) The author includes her native language in the middle of the poem most likely to:

• Show the reader what the mother tongue sounds like.

• Demonstrate the way the mother tongue interrupts her thoughts and dreams

• Symbolize the way the foreign tongue is ruining her dreams.

• Prove to herself that she can still speak it if she wants to.

Read these lines from the poem: "I ask you, what would you do / if you had two tongues in your mouth,"

These lines most likely suggest

• That the author wants to only have one tongue

• That the author is proud of her second tongue

• That the author wants the audience to understand her struggle

• That the author is curious about what it must be like to have two tongues

Which line from the poem can be described as conveying the idea of rebirth?

• "You ask me what I mean by saying I have lost my tongue."

• "your mother tongue would rot, rot and die in your mouth until you had to spit it out."

• "Every time I think I've forgotten, I think I've lost the mother tongue, it blossoms out of my mouth."

• "I ask you, what would you do if you had two tongues in your mouth, and lost the first one"

Which of the following best describes the structure of this poem?

• Quatrains with a regular pattern of rhyme

• Triplets of three successive rhyming lines

• Unrhymed lines all in the same meter

• Free verse with no rhyme or meter

One theme of this poem involves

• the importance of staying connected to your roots

• the importance of assimilating into a new culture

• the importance of learning new languages

• the importance of overcoming obstacles in life

Which words from the poem help the reader understand the meaning of the word "blossoms"

• ties, in knots

• grows back, bud opens

• pushes, aside

• time, forgotten