Literacy

In my opinion, literacy is the ability to read a text with fluency and be able to interpret it, add meaning to it, and make connections both within and outside the text. Starting to become literate is very confusing for children at a young age. It is a very complex idea to a child who cannot read and must be incredibly difficult to teach to kindergarteners.

I imagine that being an elementary school teacher is one of the hardest jobs because teaching children to read is one of the most important things, if not the most important thing, they will ever learn to do. Being able to teach something of that kind of importance is intimidating being only a sophomore in college on my way to becoming a teacher. Teaching a child the reading process might be the greatest challenge one could face as a teacher. Even though as a future middle school teacher I will not be directly teaching children how to read, it will still be something that I need to know because children have difficulties with this complex process even at older ages.

I am not sure when I became very literate. I believe that the entire reading process is so strange because I cannot remember how it happened to me. Typically one can remember something when they actually perform the action for the first time and usually can become automatic with it after multiple experiences (like the example of driving a car in the book). But for reading, even though this process is now automatic for me, I cannot seem to remember how I started out. The process of learning to read does not take place in a few days or even weeks, but years. Even as a college student, I still look for ways to better improve my skills as a reader. The process of becoming a great reader is almost a life-long experience, because we are able acquire new skills and read new texts all the time.

As for the texts, I believe that culture and the Sociocultural Theory play a huge role in the reading process. I remember reading texts in elementary school and sometimes not understanding what they meant, while other students did. For example, when we started reading about different wars in history, I had a difficult time understanding because I had no previous knowledge on wars. My family had never discussed wars with me and although I had heard some basic concepts before, the details were all very new to me. Yet other students seemed to catch on right away and understand the texts enough to read with automaticity. This was a challenge for me because I had no background knowledge on the ideas. The idea that a student's social and cultural background have an effect on their learning is a huge part of an individual's reading process.