...Literacy is defined as the ability to read and write. I grew up in a Kenya; at that particular time it wasn’t the norm for us children to be read bedtime stories before we went to sleep, taught the alphabet at an early age by our parents, or anyone else for that matter. I say this because things are completely different now. I recently went back home for a visit and my nieces and nephews wait anxiously for daddy or mummy to come read them Dr. Seuss at night, not to mention that some of them already know the whole alphabet at the age of three. My daughters were also read to when they were young. They could recite the alphabet and partially read before they ever stepped into a classroom. If I can recall correctly, I was five when I started learning how to read and write. I am glad I had the opportunity to go to school. Based on things such culture and financial resources not everyone gets to attend school. The...
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...Literacy Narrative Literacy Narrative The feeling of accomplishment was overwhelming. I vividly remember the feelings of hopelessness and despair that would plague me when I thought that I would never accomplish my goal of being fluent in French. Year after year I made the same New Year’s resolution, to learn French, but by the end of March all that remained where hopes and dreams. Every year a new edition of a audio learning courses was neatly organized in the attic to catalogue another failed attempt. It wasn't until 2012 when I was given an attractively packaged computer assisted language learning software that changed my failed attempts into an attainable reality. The software was called Rosetta Stone and instead of memorizing a list of words or mindless phrases it focused on true power of language literacy. It became clear to me that my Spanish literacy would make mastering the complexities of French sentence syntax, verb conjugation, and noun-adjective agreement simple. I had never really thought about sentence syntax! During the first French lessons I realized how similar the sentence structures between Spanish and French mirrored each other. Growing up in a bilingual house my parents decided to place me in extra Spanish classes to ensure that I could effectively communicate in Spanish. At times I would use my Spanish teachings, placing verbs ahead of the nouns, to creating some very formal sounding English expressions. As I advanced in both my English and Spanish...
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...Danielle Vargas 10 October 2014 Literacy Narrative All of my life I’ve been a dancer. I’ve been taught specific moves and motions that come with fancy French names and a rich history behind it all. The saying, “actions speak louder than words” can be applicable to dance and the movements coinciding them. I say that because when I was about 12 years old I was promoted to the third highest dance level at my studio. My dance studio was all about creating dancers that were well-rounded young ladies who were not only graceful dancers but also classy young ladies. My first advanced dance class we were given a homework assignment. The assignment was to pick one of our combinations that we did in class and write it down without using the formal names of the movements. Initially I was confused because I wasn’t used to having homework for a dance class but also the assignment seemed so difficult. My body and brain have been trained to process these movements and think of it in a straightforward way and the assignment seemed to derail that train of thought. So I went home and sat with a piece of paper and pen in my hand. I picked my favorite barre exercise and began going through the motions of the combinations in my head. I had to keep in mind that I couldn’t use the actual term of the movement and had to communicate the combination by using smaller words like, “brush of the leg” or “toe taps.” I worked hard on the assignment for my first advanced dance class. I was proud of...
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...LITERACY NARRATIVE Literacy Narrative Tyler Francis English 191 September 12, 2012 I've loved to read and write ever since I was taught my ABC's for the first time. It's been a huge part of my life in a lot of different aspects. I learned how to read when I was three years old because I went to a daycare where I was the youngest kid and the only one who couldn't read. Reading and writing just stuck with me after that. After I started reading better than my older daycare-mates, school was ready for me to conquer. The school put me with older kids right away and I was in English class with 3rd graders when I was in kindergarten. It helped me out with making friends and I always got along with older kids better than my own classmates. Elementary school is my favorite time of my life so far, because of all of the little things I learned from school and the kids that were around me and I don't think it would have been even close to how fun it was if it weren't for me being able to read so young. My love for reading stayed with me through junior high and high school too. I started reading more historical and biographical books than adventure and story books as I got older. My favorite books went from the “Harry Potter” series to Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln biographies. Starting in high school too, I got more into writing than before. I would try writing stories when I was in 4th or 5th grade, but I could never write more than two pages without me changing the whole...
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...Words Sitting alone on a West Midlands train, I buried my face in my hands wondering what on earth I should do. “I can’t do this,” I told myself. I’d just spent the day calling international schools in Europe trying to sell them an education package for a friend’s business. I think telesales is one of the most soul sucking activities in the entire business world! “I can’t make money for other people for the rest of my life,” I said. “I won’t.” It was the summer of 2005, and it was my seventh day back on British soil after serving an 18-month mission for the LDS church in the US. I graduated with a degree in international business management before my mission, but now the prospect of pushing paper for a career, like all the other business minions, was not appealing. Like the sunny countryside whizzing by, my own train of though was working its way through hills and valleys of possibility. By the time I stepped of that train in my hometown, I had decided to go back to school and leave the country. Speech-language pathology was my ticket out of town. Five months later I had a confirmation of my choice. Without ever asking for it, I received a brochure in the mail from a college in Boston about my chosen program. As I pored over the booklet, one sentence, one word reverberated from the page: “Emerson college desires compassionate students.” Compassion. One word, seven sounds, was reason enough for me to pack up my life, sell everything that didn’t fit in my black...
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...Wilson 1 Fantasy Football for Dummies by a Dummy Larry Wilson Fantasy football is a football competition with a league of imaginary teams comprised of real professional football players that the participants own, manage, and coach. The fantasy league games are scored and won or lost based on statistics generated by actual players or teams during their actual games. Today, this is all done automatically via a computer, a web site, television, or even a mobile phone, but it did not start out that way. This virtualization of the game led me down a path of realization that if I wanted to run a fair, fun, and competitive fantasy football league, a good deal of writing was required of me. I began playing fantasy football back in 1994 with a group of Marines while stationed in Japan when computers were rare and the Internet was not yet a reality for most. Instead, we utilized the box scores of the games printed in the newspaper the following day, which contained the pertinent statistics required to calculate the fantasy scores for each manager’s team. This was a slow, tedious, and time-consuming process to be sure, but it also provided me as commissioner of the league a great deal of control. Nearly all communication regarding the league was accomplished verbally and in person since we were all deployed overseas together. Everything from league rules to scores to disputes were handled this way and therefore there was a minimal requirement for writing. Over the years...
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...I grew up in a very fortunate family; we never really had to worry about a low income, and we were able to buy extra stuff and go on other trips unlike other families. I never really understood how we were able to do this seeing as my parents did not go to college. They also rarely ever read; if they did it would be a magazine or an article online, and they never wrote. My parents would always push me to read more and always do well on my writing assignments and review them over and over again so they would be the best of my ability. Back then I never really understood why they would make me do all of this, but now that I am a bit older and understand how important these traits are, I understand why they did this. I’ll never forget my English teacher my junior year of high school, Mr. Stanizzi. He was the most inspirational teacher I have ever had in my life. He genuinely loved his job and made English class fun, and fascinating. By this time I thought for sure that no teacher was ever going to change my opinion on writing, but he proved me wrong. There was something he did while teaching and analyzing poems that really struck my interest. Every week we would have a period just focusing on either writing our own poems or analyzing them. There was one particular poem that I was extremely proud of and showed Stanizzi the poem. He was shocked that I wrote such a good poem. He liked my poem so much he read it to the class for an example and he still reads it to his...
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...Professor Czaja English 101 September 9 2015 If there was one thing I learned freshman year, it was to not believe what everyone has to say. Everyone told me that freshman year classes were the easiest, and they were completely wrong. Sadly it was back to reality, no more staying up late and sleeping in with not a worry about what I was going to do that day. Now I had a schedule to follow Monday through Friday that involved homework, studying, writing essays, and soccer practice. It was seven thirty in the morning on the first day of school, which was the earliest I had been up in 3 months and I was already working on an assignment. I never would have guessed my first day of classes would involve graded assignments and homework. I assumed it would be full of listening to the teacher explain the ten page long syllabus that only comes in use during the first week of school, while I daydream about my summer, trying to fight my eyelids from closing. But the assumption I made about the typical first day of high school was completely wrong and it changed my outlook on high school for the rest of the year. It’s seven thirty in the morning, the sun is barely out and I’m already sweating through my t-shirt. Luckily I am not the only one, as I look around the classroom everyone looks miserable and fatigued. You could tell everyone wanted to be anywhere but at Anderson High School. The bell had just rung and our English teacher introduced himself and it seemed like it was going...
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...The pen is mightier than the sword In an instant, your existence can be altered. It only takes an instant when you might discovery yourself traveling down a dissimilar route than you started on. You may never identify it, but the meekest form of literacy could make the world of difference in one’s life. Between the ages of four and nine, your child will have to master some 100 phonics rules, learn to recognize 3,000 words with just a glance, and develop a comfortable reading speed approaching 100 words a minute. He must learn to combine words on the page with a half-dozen squiggles called punctuation into something – a voice or image in his mind that gives back meaning. (Paul Kropp, 1996). Writing, disbelieve it or not, is continuous in your daily life. Whether making a shopping list, comprising an electronic message, or just doing your schoolwork, there is no escape from writing. In my case, however, writing came to be my only recovery for righteousness. On an apparently ordinary, stress-free, fall day in Afghanistan, I found myself running down the street on the Forward Operating Base of Salarno where I spent my fourth tour overseas. It goes without saying that writing was next to the last thing on my mind as I was talking with friends and keeping a steady pace. As things seem to do, my priorities were about to severely change. As the Base was attacked by three men in an open field, I was knocked back by one single rocket hitting a nearby building. As I opened my eyes I saw...
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...Katie Fuller English 1010 Ms. Wardell 18 September 2015 How Alcohol Has Influenced My Literacy Not everyone really remembers how or when they learned to read and write. In fact, most people do not. I am one of those people that do not. So, this is not so much a story of “how” as much as it is a story of some recollections of my journey through literacy as a whole. From my first big kid book, to learning a new language, and everything in between. Not all of these recollections are necessarily positive ones, though. My father had a lot of negative influence on me when I was younger, and I believe he is the reason I am still not the greatest student. Once when I was in first grade, my class was taking our weekly spelling test. None of the words were particularly difficult, considering we were only in first grade. In fact, I specifically remember the word “pie” being one of the words. For whatever reason, though, I could not seem to keep up with my teacher as she called out the words. She would call out a word, and before I could finish writing, she had already called out the next, and the next, and the next. Eventually, being the cry baby I am, I started sobbing uncontrollably because I was sure I was going to fail. In the middle of the test! Once she realized I was crying, she turns to me and asks, “What’s wrong?” I felt way too embarrassed to tell her and the whole class that I could not keep up with them, so I ended up blurting out, “I just miss my dad.” My dad had been...
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...One of my very earliest memories is my mum taking my sister and I on our first trip to the library. As I remember, I was not a big fan of that first experience. I was dragged away from my toys and games and made to walk down to the local library. The library was old and smelt like my grandmas house. The front door creaked and scraped along the ground leaving marks across the rotten, wooden floorboards. Once you were inside, you were welcomed by the old librarian, her name was Mary. She was short and plump with a hunch back and big feet. I remember trying to keep as far away from her as possible. In the library there was shelf after shelf of books and a few couch chairs scattered around the room with fabric tearing off the sides. This was my earliest memory of being exposed to books and libraries and it was definitely not an experience I enjoyed. When I turned 5 my outlook on reading began to change after I received many new books for my birthday. Each night my mum would make me a sweet hot chocolate, settle me down into bed and get out one of my new books. I loved to listen to my mother read to me, she always knew how to keep me entertained, by raising the pitch of her voice and really getting into the story of the book. But after a few nights I decided I wanted to read by myself. I grabbed a book, opening the cardboard cover to these crisp, white, glossy pages with paragraphs printed in Times New Roman and artistic, cartoon drawings at the bottom of each page. Reading for...
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...At this point in my life I find myself in an interesting predicament regarding my attitudes toward reading and writing; more so towards reading. Years ago I used to love reading books for pleasure but nowadays I find myself reading things that little to no effort to digest. This includes the very basic posts on facebook expressing one’s opinion on something or articles and threads on reddit discussing topics I find intriguing. Perhaps it’s the severe senioritis that has overcome me as I enter my last semester at Chapman University. As I’ve gotten lazier I can see it start to reflect in my everyday life. Deep down I still love to read but I rarely find myself getting truly invested into the action unless it relates to something I am very passionate about. My passion for reading began back as second and third grader in Elementary school. One thing I remember is I always got excited when the teachers would pass out the booklets advertising all the scholastic books you could choose from for that month. I would be very meticulous in my process of picking books based on the pictures and description as I only wanted to get ones I thought were best. There was no better feeling walking into class and seeing the piles of books at the front of the room. I would sometimes sneak a peek to see which kid had the biggest stack for that month. Once I got my books I would treat the books with the utmost care, as if they were precious treasure. And to me that’s really what they were, my...
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...Decoding the Alphabet Letter after letter, together in different combinations, large and small, individually they are just the alphabet. However, these letters in different combinations are a mystery to me. I’m just wishing I had a decoder ring like orphan Annie did, or an enigma, maybe that way I could decipher the secret of this hidden message that is before me. All I can see is groups of letters; an alphabet soup of sorts. This is the way I felt while in the first grade. The teacher had set a progress report on my table that was to be handed to my parents. I ran all the way home exited and impatient. I don’t even remember looking both ways when crossing streets along the way. I just wanted to get home as fast as I could. As soon as I arrived, I just flung the door open and ran into the house searching for my mother. I found her in the laundry room folding clothes that she had just finished ironing. At home, my family always spoke Spanish, English was hardly if ever used. So I practically threw the progress card toward her. “Mama mira lo que me dio la profesora para ti!” My mother took the card and looked at it. Then she flipped it over and looked at it again. She had a puzzled look on her face as she turned it back to the front. I just looked up at her with big round eyes waiting for an explanation as to the secret that it held. “Que es lo que dice?” “Se lo daremos a tu padre cuando llege.” “Pero que dice?” “Tendras que esperarte.” Great, why won’t she tell...
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...learning the second language can be a scary and new experience. one of the hardest thing I have ever had to do was speaking English in the public. I was afraid of speaking English in the public without grammar, or pronunciation mistake, but I decided that speaking in the pubic was an important skill that I should learn. I also thought it would a good motivation and chance to help me improve my English. What I did not realize was that learning to speak in the public would also make me more confident person………………………………………………………………………………………………. The new situation always makes me a bit nervous, and my first speaking in the public lesson was no exception. After I knew my topic subject a day before I represent my speech. I went early to my school and I stood timidly by the side of the class waiting for my teacher and other students to show up. After a couple of minutes, the teacher came over. He smiled and two more students joined us. Although they were both older than me, they did not seem to be embarrassed about not knowing how to give a speech front of twenty students. I began to feel more at ease. The teacher start calls our names randomly. I was praying to the last person to represent my speech. I concentrated on the students speech and try to avoid their mistakes not just listening, but also write down the important points. ……………………. At 10:30 a.m. I still remember that moment I was the third person on my teacher list, he called out...
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...Technology Is a Double-edged Sword There is no doubt that in the 21st century, technology hugely influences the way we think, communicate and complete our work. With the constant technological innovations in computers and phones, we are experiencing a completely new and more enriched lifestyle. Nowadays, with millions of apps launched via platforms such as the Appstore on iPhones, iPads and Macbooks, we are becoming more and more dependent on the Internet and social media. Every day, college students use Facebook to communicate with friends and browse Instagram to keep up with the times and follow every friend’s lives. Without any argument, the new digital world makes our lives more interesting and colorful. However, I consider technology a double-edged sword, especially cellphone applications. Even though technology enriches our lives from many perspectives, it may sometimes negatively affect us socially and academically. I still recall when I got my first iPhone. It was also my introduction to Instagram. Back in middle school, when I was only 15 years old, my dad gave me an iPhone 3GS as a birthday gift. I was already very excited when I saw the pure white box. However, it shocked me more when I started up the phone. The app store had hundreds of apps, which were classified by categories, such as games, music, and lifestyles. At first, I was not sure if I could use such a great number of functions in such a small phone, but when the Wi-Fi was connected, it felt like opening...
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