Developing My Personal Literacy Skills

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My personal literacy development has been a constant struggle since my arrival in America as a boy with a Spanish-speaking mother and a bi-lingual father. We spoke Spanish at home. As I began school I could only speak a small amount of English and understood only slightly more. I learnt, as young children do, through listening to the people around me and using any visual aids I could to scaffold the gaps in my understanding (Winch, Johnston, March, Ljungdahl, Holliday, 2012). My lack of basic literacy affected every area of my learning with only math classes allowing me to feel slightly comfortable due to the international nature of numerical literacy. I quickly developed the oracy skills required to be able to contribute to social and academic situations but unfortunately developed other ways to hide my lack of progress in other areas. My reading and writing skills were still very poor when I left primary school, I had missed out on a lot of the foundations of these skills and they were never addressed again in my later schooling life. I used many shortcuts like audio books and abridged texts to lessen the amount of reading I was required to do during my time in high school. My reading abilities remained at the same level for many years and it took a wonderful author and a 28 hour flight to remedy this. My vocabulary and comprehension have improved immeasurably in the time since that day and now I love to read and do a lot of additional reading to develop my literacy further. Within the area of written literacy my main difficulties are with punctuation and grammar. It is only now in the past year I have taken the time and had the motivation to improve my writing. After completing a unit entitled Thinking and Writing at Univers... ... middle of paper ... ...unit, the rest of this course and beyond I will need to utilise my personal experiences in literacy development and continue to develop my skills. This will be vital in providing my future students with the grounding in literacy they deserve. Works Cited ACARA. (2012). The Australian Curriculum v3.0. Retrieved March 22nd , 2011, from The Australian Curriculum: http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/GeneralCapabilities/Literacy/Introduction/Introduction Lindsfors, J.D. (1991). Children’s Language and Learning (2nd ed.). Needham, MA: Pearson Education. O’Neill,S., Gish, A. (2008). Teaching English as a second language. South Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press. Winch, G., Johnston, R., March, P., Ljungdahl, L., & Holliday, M. (2010). Literacy: Reading, writing and children’s literature (4th ed.). South Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press.

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