This literacy narrative reflects on a reading experience in elementary school. This helped shape me into who I am today. The purpose, problems and results are all present in the writing.
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Read, Write and Learn!
Throughout my years in elementary school my teachers would have monthly one on one reading comprehension exams that reveal what level of reading you could handle. I vividly remember my classmates and I anxiously reading through books and class assignments to acquire as much reading intel and any possible advantage prior to being tested. All the books in the library had a sticker with corresponding letters from A to Z. The closer you were to Z the better your reading was compared to your classmates was how we all viewed it back then.
There was a sense of desperation within my classmates and I to reach the pinnacle of level Z. A common joke back then was that the English dictionary was the ultimate level Z book.
Here we were in my 5th grade classroom. All the students innocently and patiently sitting at their desks waiting to get called up by Miss. Torres and sit across from her with her book, folder and grading paper staring you in the face. This caused an uncontrollable sense of anxiety and impatience to almost everyone when taking this seat. The “library” was at the end of the classroom next to the windows where the books were stacked and not in alphabetical order. It was a somewhat intense environment where we’d sometimes peek at whomever was being tested and attempt to read his/her body language to guage their success. I remember slightly looking over when some of friends were up with a book in front of my face to avoid potential eye contact with my teacher.
This sort of testing released a competitive vibe throughout the classroom and the quest of my classmates and I turned from testing and improving your reading ability to approaching level Z as quickly as possible. It drove me and perhaps some of my classmates to read extra books and articles at home to better prepare us for these tests. For me it became an unwritten rule to read extra as homework. It became so frequent that the extra felt mandatory. The teachers never revealed the date of these exams so you had to prepare yourself ahead of time. I remember watching some of my friends take the test only to see them run into the bathroom crying or sit in a corner and pout five minutes later after failing to perform well enough to earn a letter promotion. This scene became a lesson where I knew I had to take this seriously so I didn’t end up in the same position as my peers.
When it was unexpectedly my turn to complete the exam I stood up, took a deep breath and confidently walked toward Miss. Torres. She gave me several passages from several texts to read and I breezed through them. She then glanced towards me and grabbed a passage from a different pile and asked me to read the couple of sentences. I read it without hesitation and earned a promotion jumping two letter towards letter T. It initially was relieving yet I still hadn’t reached level Z. Now looking back at it these tests not only brought my competitive drive out but it enhanced my reading ability and literacy in elementary school. The extra reading, studying and fear of failure allowed me to learn at a faster pace. Unfortunately I never reached the ultimate goal of eclipsing level Z but my learning greatly benefitted from that long-term. These lessons are harder to locate in hindsight but they were littered all over my childhood so it’s a matter of reminiscing the good, bad and ugly memories of my learning experiences. My relationships with my teachers and students along with this key classroom activity enhanced my learning.
This test was helpful for all of us because it didn’t matter how fluent your English is. I had plenty of classmates whose primary language wasn’t English and my teacher(s) had each student read and learn at their own pace when being tested so that it didn’t feel like a pro-English speaking environment. This allowed students to keep their original sound house while comfortably enhancing their language and literacy learning.
Reflection
Some of the insights gained include learning how flexible I am regarding different forms of English knowing that I know a lot of people who may not excel in reading, writing and speaking English. While I was thinking of a topic for this assignment I realized that my family and friends allowed me to understand different variations of English based on how they read, write and speak. Based on phase one my hunger to learn enhances my learning ability in terms of writing and rhetoric. I suppose I am eager to learn as much as possible which improves the quality of my work. I also came to the realization of how challenging it is to learn the English language especially when it’s not your native language. Some of those challenges include deciphering words that sound the same yet have completely different meanings. For Instance, the words “write” and “right” sound exactly the same and they hold different definitions. One’s accent also alters how they learn some words. There also are a ton of grammatical lessons that you need to learn which can overwhelm some learners.
My audience highly impacts my writing because I adjust my writing based on who my target audience is. I wouldn’t expect my audience to always accommodate to my style of writing because it can lead to misinterpretations and I want my audience to receive the full gist. Evidence and analysis has also impacted my writing because I need to properly support my argumentative assignments with credible evidence and solid analysis or else my work is illegitimate. As a reader it is extremely helpful to have your writer tailor their style towards you because it demonstrates the writers’ care and concern for his/her audience and what points they are trying to get across. It is also more appealing to have legitimate evidence and analysis so that the reader trusts your work.
Now looking back at some of the class readings I believe I achieved the course learning goal of “recognizing the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing and hierarchizing languages and their users, and be open to communicating across different languages and cultures.” There were discussions in class that lit a light bulb in my head suggesting that we as a society hierarchize the English language with formal white English being at the top and the non-native English speakers drop down the pecking order. I was also able to “Gather, interpret, assess and critically evaluate information and arguments from a variety of sources and points of view.” This is based off the rhetorical situation worksheets that allowed me to reach this goal after reading different points of view from different authors.
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