Literacy Autobiography
Shang Wang
Mr. Noe
ENG 1301.15
Feb 23 2011
Literacy Autobiography
I have come a long way down my road of knowledge and learning of English throughout my life and it has taken me places and shown me things I would have never expected when I first started out on this long journey, and it includes things that most other student’s do not. I have learned so much, so fast and it has taken me far from home and around the world. While most of the people I know have traveled the same road their whole lives and have grown up in very similar ways, my experiences tell a whole different story.
I was born and raised as a child in Beijing, China and grew up around people that spoke mandarin Chinese all the time. Mandarin was my primary language growing up as a child, I learned how to read and write when I first started school and I have been speaking Mandarin for twenty years now. This was my first challenge I faced about learning because it takes so much memorization and practice to learn such a vast language and there were times when I thought I couldn’t do it but I got help from my parents and my teachers. At times I wanted to give up because my teachers would get mad at me for saying or writing the wrong thing. I remember a certain memory in third grade of being called to the board to spell the word “student”, but I spelled it incorrectly and I’ll never forget because the whole class laughed at me and the teacher was very disappointed. But I knew I couldn’t give up and with enough time and effort I began to get good at writing essays and reading books in Chinese. As I progressed in school they started teaching English along with Mandarin because it is such an important language to the world and widely used and this just added to the challenge of being a successful student. With more help from my parents and teachers I started to learn enough English to read my first book, which was Forest Gump, which I really liked and it also became one of my favorite movies. I
Mr. Noe
ENG 1301.15
Feb 23 2011
Literacy Autobiography
I have come a long way down my road of knowledge and learning of English throughout my life and it has taken me places and shown me things I would have never expected when I first started out on this long journey, and it includes things that most other student’s do not. I have learned so much, so fast and it has taken me far from home and around the world. While most of the people I know have traveled the same road their whole lives and have grown up in very similar ways, my experiences tell a whole different story.
I was born and raised as a child in Beijing, China and grew up around people that spoke mandarin Chinese all the time. Mandarin was my primary language growing up as a child, I learned how to read and write when I first started school and I have been speaking Mandarin for twenty years now. This was my first challenge I faced about learning because it takes so much memorization and practice to learn such a vast language and there were times when I thought I couldn’t do it but I got help from my parents and my teachers. At times I wanted to give up because my teachers would get mad at me for saying or writing the wrong thing. I remember a certain memory in third grade of being called to the board to spell the word “student”, but I spelled it incorrectly and I’ll never forget because the whole class laughed at me and the teacher was very disappointed. But I knew I couldn’t give up and with enough time and effort I began to get good at writing essays and reading books in Chinese. As I progressed in school they started teaching English along with Mandarin because it is such an important language to the world and widely used and this just added to the challenge of being a successful student. With more help from my parents and teachers I started to learn enough English to read my first book, which was Forest Gump, which I really liked and it also became one of my favorite movies. I
Cited: Vol. 79, No. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp. 98-99. 2/16/2011. Moll, Luis, Norma Gonzalez. “Lessons from Research with Language-Minority Children”. Journal of Reading Behavior 26.4 (1994): 439-56