Literacy Experience Essay

Reading has help shaped my development as a second language learner by being able to acquire what I have learned as a student. I have teachers who are willing to help further my education as a second language learner. Although I am not a fluent native English speaker like other ethnicities, I learn to strive hard in order to understood and communicate with others. Growing up, I struggle with my literacy because my parents did not have any books that will help me advance in my reading growth. Therefore, I can say that my personal sea of stories were different from other peers. I do not have the brightest literacy experience since I grew up in a traditional Hmong family and we lack the advantages to our literacy because my parents were never

My parents do not make us read because they were not born in the United States but Laos. Hence, my parents and grandparents had never influence me and my siblings to read, for example, my mother never pushes me and my siblings to read a book or having her read to us before. Stories like Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and The Beast, Pocahontas, and The Little Mermaid. These stories, I have never read them as a child but only saw the movies. As a child, I don’t have much literacy experiences with my own family because everyone was busy; my father was a full-time college student at a community college, my mother was a housewife whose English was very limited and two older siblings whose busy with school and work and doesn’t have the time to help me and the rest of my other siblings. My family influence had impacted my literacy experiences because I feel like I did not gain any good remarks when it came to school

Reading and writing became a problem for me because I was not acquiring the knowledge as a second language learner. Being a second language learner was difficult because learning another language that is not my own was hard to comprehend. At home I spoke Hmong more than English and I found that my native language had impacted my English learning. My English literacy became broken and I used wrong tense and verb as I try to communicate with others. The reason was that I rarely communicate in English with my family, friends, or teachers because I am usually with my mother. Hence, me and my siblings picked up Hmong more than English since my mother at the time was illiterate and could not encourage me or my siblings to read and practice our literacy skill. Instead my siblings and I were encouraged by our parents on knowing how to read and write in Hmong. My parents enrolled me and my younger siblings to an afterschool program to learn Hmong because they wanted us to be educated and know where our linage came from. Hence, being stuck in between two languages was a concerned for me because both languages were different and did not correlate with each other. For example, the dialects, forms, and along with the sentences and grammar structures were different. Aside from being fluent in my own language, I have to encourage myself to read books that were not written in my language. The only time I can truly practice my