My Literacy Autobiography

Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, my six sisters and I were always looking for fun things to do with the other kids in the neighborhood. If we weren’t playing softball or kickball in our large back yard or one of the neighbor kids’ yards, we were riding our bikes up and down the street, usually flying down King Drive's awesome hill with both hands in the air as we headed home just before dark. While most of the time we were just playing and enjoying the outdoors, during one particular summer we got creative, writing and performing short plays for the other kids who lived on our street.

This was the first time I had ever seen my written work produced and performed for a real audience. It was not a scholarly or academic effort, but I remember the experience as one of the most enjoyable activities I had ever been involved in.

During my upper elementary and junior high school years, I wrote many book reports and short “research” papers for various classes, but the assignment that stands out most in my mind as a serious academic effort was the paper on the history of the Jewish people that I wrote for my ninth grade English class. I wrote this lengthy paper longhand, carefully forming the words of the report on every other line of my paper, making sure to leave enough space at the bottom of the sheet for the appropriate footnotes. My teacher had taught us the basic formatting style for source citations, along with the correct method of organizing a term paper.

During my senior year in high school I took two English courses: Advanced Grammar and Advanced Composition. One of our daily assignments in the Composition class was to write in a journal, which the teacher would collect and “grade” periodically. I don’t remember if we were told what the purpose of this journal-writing was, but it served as a quasi-diary of my daily activities. I don’t think we did any additional assignments or projects based on what we had recorded in our journals, but it was good practice in narrative writing. I do remember that at the time it seemed like a chore to write something every day.

I had begun studying French during my freshman year in high school, and while the first few years of study did not provide opportunities for much academic writing in a second language, it did give me practice in personal writing. We all had pen pals from French-speaking countries, and mine was a girl who lived in France. She wrote to me in English, and I wrote back in French. Writing to her and reading the letters she wrote to me helped me to understand that writing in a second or foreign language could be very challenging. I used my big English-French dictionary to find words or expressions that I wanted to include in my letters but did not already know. Thinking back, I wonder how many of those words or expressions actually made sense to her. Corresponding with a French girl my own age was a lot of fun, and it solidified my resolve to continue studying and learning the French language.

I added Spanish to my schedule the following year, and German the year after that. (I think I wanted to experience many languages to broaden my view of the world and to be able to communicate with as many people as possible in the future.)

After high school I attended a small, Christian liberal arts college in Indiana (5 hours from my hometown in Ohio), and continued to develop my writing skills in English in several genres. I experimented with poetry writing for my own enjoyment, and I became a journalist for the campus newspaper, writing news and feature stories for the weekly editions. I served as managing editor for the newspaper as well, and helped to plan issues, deal with layouts, and coordinate all aspects of the production of the newspaper. In addition to my work with the campus newspaper, I contributed to and served as editor for the college’s creative writing magazine. These extra-curricular writing opportunities seemed more like “fun” than “work,” but my professors kept me busy writing research papers for various classes, so it was not “all play.”

Reflecting back to those days as an undergraduate student, it is amazing to realize that so much of the “fun” writing, the extra-curricular writing, was done at the oddest hours of the day and well into the night. We often worked on the newspaper until the early hours of the morning in order to complete the final draft so that we could get it to the printer on time the next day. Rather than being exhausted the next day (or actually later that morning!), I usually felt great, sort of like a mother who has birthed a baby after many hours of labor.

After earning my Bachelor’s degree in English Education, I began my graduate work at Indiana University. I studied French for a few years in order to complete my teaching certification in the language. One of the upper-level courses I took was in French Literature and Civilization. We had many writing assignments in this class, and of course, we were required to write in French. Even though I had completed several college courses in French already, writing essays in the language proved to be more difficult than I had imagined it would be. I quickly learned that I could not simply write the essay in English and then translate it into French. Instead, in order to write effectively I had to start thinking and composing in my second language so that I could express myself more effectively in French. I still used my huge dictionary when I got stuck for a particular word or phrase, but the more writing I did, the easier it became to write coherent paragraphs and essays.

I eventually relocated with my family to Illinois, and I spent the next few years raising children, substitute-teaching, and working as a correspondent for a small-town newspaper. My job involved discovering newsworthy activities around town and writing articles about them for the weekly paper. I also had the opportunity to write about other subjects and to create a column of whatever I felt would be of interest to the readers. This was like a dream come true. I was getting paid (okay, it was $50 a week!) to do something I loved to do, and there were people reading my work every week. What a wonderful experience that was!

In the interest of time and space, at this point I will fast-forward.

Over the past three decades I have taught four different subject areas: English, Latin, French, and Computers; and I have taught at three different levels: middle school, high school, and college (undergraduate).

In 2006, I fulfilled a lifelong dream of traveling to France when I flew to Paris with my daughter and her January term class. We spent a week learning about the history of Paris and absorbing as much of the city and region as possible. We shopped at the sidewalk vendors, in big department stores and at flea markets. We explored the city by bus and by train, and of course, on foot. We spoke French to native speakers, and got along wonderfully. It was amazing to discover that we could communicate effectively in a non-English speaking environment.

I think that trip triggered something inside me that had lain dormant for years, because I started thinking about going back to graduate school to complete my degree.  I eased myself out of the business world that I had been involved in full-time since 2000, and began taking courses at ISU in January, 2009. Since February, 2010, I have been teaching English to second-language learners at the English Language Institute at ISU, while pursuing a Master’s degree in English studies with a concentration in TESOL.     

           In my experience as a student learning a foreign language, and as a teacher teaching English to students from other countries, I have learned that developing a native-like level of literacy in a second language is a long, involved process. In my own case, I know that at this point in my life I would need to devote a lot of time and effort in order to recapture the level of literacy in French that I had previously achieved, but I think it is a worthwhile goal.