My Literacy Narrative
I have to admit that I am very impetuous at heart now. I rarely settle down to read a book. Most of the time, I just skim the table of contents or read condensed reviews on the Internet to get a quick idea of what the book is about. But it wasn't like that when I was a kid.
I think my literacy narrative comes mostly from my family and living environment. My mother was a Chinese teacher and my father was a coal miner, and my parents had three children, which was very rare in China in the 1990s because of the one-child policy. However, our family is in a remote town in the north, and the control is not particularly strict. Fortunately, I am the first child, and my parents have enough time and energy to accompany me, and they are full of expectations for the first child. Since my mother was a teacher, we lived in the school, and the school library and the school teachers were free resources for me to acquire knowledge. My parents would tell me bedtime stories every day, and when they were busy, I would go to the library and wait for them after work. In my bedroom, one wall is made into a bookcase, and there are all kinds of books in it. When I was a child, my favorite must be Grimm's fairy tales and 1001 nights. When my parents told me the tone was very exaggerated, it was very fascinating, so I was familiar with the story content. When I learned Pinyin, I still liked these two books. My parents bought a version with Pinyin and I turned into the books before going to bed every day. I will compare the version of my parents and the Pinyin book version of the difference, and keep asking them questions to understand the difference. After my younger sister was born, the family expenses were also relatively large, my father became very busy and often went on business trips, and my mother also worked many night shifts to support the family. I would tell my sister stories, sometimes according to the book, sometimes made up stories.
I learned the skill of making up stories with my grandmother. Sometimes when my parents are away, they will send me to my grandmother's home. My grandmother can't read, but she can always tell many strange stories that are not in books. I learned the skill of making up stories with my grandmother. Sometimes when my parents were away, they would send me to my grandmother's house. My grandmother could not read, but she could always tell a lot of strange stories that were not in books. I was fascinated by these stories and afraid that there would be no such stories when I returned home, so I would write down the stories my grandmother told me, and use pictures or pinyin to replace the words that I could not write. The book I wrote later became a source of material for my sister to tell stories, and my sister would add some content when she could read, and we would make up stories as children to frighten my brother, and these stories were written into this little notebook.
My home is in the family area of the school, so my neighbors are all teachers, and I sometimes go to the home of an English teacher for dinner. She is Aunt Tang, who gave me my first introduction to English. According to the setting of compulsory education in China, English is generally not introduced until the third grade of primary school. However, I heard English songs, read English words and stories at Aunt Tang's house when I was very young, and she also taught me to drink tea and milk together. It was very painful to recite English words for me in junior high school. After I told Aunt Tang, she taught me to recite words by splitting syllables. In the final exam a week later, I got full marks in English and ranked first in the whole grade. Although our school was very small and remote, this honor also gave me great inspiration, and I fell in love with English from then on, and took the initiative to read the books of the Bookworm series. This set of books is also recommended by Aunt Tang, the left side of this series of books is English, the right side is Chinese, the materials are from the world classics, Oliver Twist, Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre and so on. This set of books allows me to quickly accumulate a lot of reading vocabulary, and the accumulation of famous stories is also of great help to Chinese writing.
I deeply understand that the accumulation of reading in my childhood has greatly helped my language learning, whether it is Chinese or English, so I continue to read to my daughter every night after she is born. Her favorite now is Elsa from Frozen, and she can retell stories in Chinese just like I did when I was young. I also read her the English version so many times and she actually recited the first page of the English version herself, which surprised me. I was once again deeply shocked by the power of reading. So I bought all the Disney books, which are in Chinese and English, and we would watch Disney movies with her during our movie time every week, and then read these books on a regular basis. My daughter loved them very much.
From my personal experience, I find that interest is the biggest motivation. I like fairy tales and suspense stories, and my daughter likes Elsa, both of which drive us to want to read more content and try to retell it by ourselves. Therefore, I often encourage students to discuss and express their cognition of the topic before reading, or what interesting content they can think of. Students can first share, and then read with interests and questions to find relevant information, which will be more motivated to read. I will guide students to retell what they have read and write a summary, which will also practice their grammar and vocabulary.
I am sorry that my reading has become very utilitarian, I can not calm down to read books slowly, but I deeply know the importance of reading, I will still review books or look at the catalog to select which is what I need. Therefore, I rarely read novels now, and the books I read are functional books, such as how to cultivate children's habits and non-violent communication. Instead, I can learn a lot when I teach my daughter picture books. Now picture books have both stories and non-fiction popular science content, and I find it very interesting to flip through books and audio books in various versions. The book I recently finished reading is Thirty Million Words, the Chinese translation is the language of parents, a very famous book blogger Fan Deng recommended. I like this translation very much. This book makes me rethink the way I communicate with my daughter and students, and how to create a language environment for children and I really benefited a lot.
