Learning English Literacy

Do you remember the teacher who had a significant impaction on your English literacy development? I do. I started to learn English as a second language when I was a child. At that time, I just learned some nursery rhymes and daily conversation. During that time, I really liked learning English because learning English was so much fun. Later, as I grew up, I found learning English is not fun anymore because I have to remember lots of words, their meanings and spellings, which is tedious. Besides that, I have to remember the grammar rules, which is so painful to me. However my feeling about English was changed as I moved to high school. I meet Mr. Wang there and he reignite my passion in writing.

Mr. Wang taught English writing class in my high

school.

He was such a strict teacher that almost no one wanted to take his class. The first time I met him in the lounge, his was wearing a white shirt which seems to turn a little bit yellow. He had a pair of thick glasses on his face. His hair was greasy. All these made me doubt his ability in teaching. I wondered if he really could teach me something. Then I had a short conversation with him, and he corrected me for every single word I spoke. I felt so uncomfortable and embarrassed after talked with him. Later in his class, he always required us to write essays as homework after class, and he would screen one or two essays on the board and corrected the grammar mistakes in front of the whole class. He usually read the essay three times. For the first time, he would mark all the grammar mistakes with a red pen; for the second time, he would check the content and the word choice; as the third time, he would try to improve the sentences. Unfortunately, my

essay was always shown as a sample essay to other students. After the correction, my essay was always full with red marks and I felt so bad about that. Initially, I tried to reduce the number of red marks by editing my essay before submission but it was not as helpful as I thought. I still got numerous red marks after class. Thus, I started to avoid him, tried to put my essay at the bottom of other’s essays and tried to use common words and short sentence to avoid grammar mistakes. But, these were effortless, I was still easily to be picked up and each time I got lots of red marks. I felt so depressed and even began to think if he was trying to shame me. So, I started to hate English composition.

It wasn’t until I unconsciously heard a conversation between Mr.

Wang and another teacher that I realized what he thought about. Mr. Wang said, “Tony had some good ideas in his writing, well, if he could make fewer grammar mistakes, his essays will be much better……..So I always put his essays on the screen…I hope he can realize the most common errors he usually made and avoid them in the future. I believe this would benefit him a lot.” I was surprised by what he said. I never thought he was trying to help me and I started to realize that I truly learned lots of things from the red marks. So from that day, I changed. I began going to Mr. Wang’s office hour frequently to ask him how to improve my essay. Whenever he corrected me about my oral English, I would write that down on my notebook and tried to avoid making the same mistake again. Under Mr. Wang’s help, my English improved rapidly. Initially, I couldn’t write an essay longer than 300 words but later I could write much longer than that. Besides, I got a higher TOEFL score on writing than before. Also, my high school teachers teaching me other subjects told me I wrote better than before. Those things reignited my passion of English. I felt so grateful to Mr. Wang’s help. Without his strict teaching style, I couldn’t have improved so

much.

Now I am able to sit down and write with much more confidence. When I write an essay, the red marks always come my mind reminded me to write clearly and correctly. I so appreciate the red marks and feel grateful to Mr. Wang’s dedicated help.