My English Literacy Development

Improved Essays
A major impact to my literacy development occurred when I was only four years old, and reminds me of the quote from Nelson Mandela, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes into his head. If you talk to a man in his own language, that goes into his heart.” (Mandela). I can relate to this quote because Arabic is my first language, not English, so when someone speaks to me in English the translation has to first take place in my head so that I can make sense of it. However, when they speak to me in Arabic the meaning goes straight to my heart. The significant event in my English literacy development took place when my family emigrated from Jerusalem to the United States. It affected my grammar, reading, and writing, all which …show more content…
Learning to read the English language was especially challenging because of the use of homophones and homographs. It was troublesome to find out that a word can be spelled the same but pronounced different or have different meanings, such as, “the wind blew”, or “wind that toy up”. Additionally, finding out there are several words with the same meaning was even more confusing. It was hard enough to learn one new English word for an object, but to find out that a single object can be called by many different names was overwhelming. Imagine my fear when I found out that not only did I have to learn how to pronounce the English words, but I had to learn the different uses for each word, and all the different words used for a single object. For example, am I sitting on a couch or a sofa? In Arabic, there is only one word, أريكة, that represents the five English words; couch, sofa, settee, armchair, and davenport. For this reason, as an adult I still find it intimidating to read out loud. While I have grown more comfortable with pronouncing the words, I continue to struggle with how many words there are that are spelled differently, but mean the same

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