Philadelphia Reads

My Literacy Narrative
The story of my literacy began when I was a baby. My mother and father were both college-educated which is something I believe affected my literacy as I grew and developed. My mother and father, as well as my two older sisters, would speak to me when I was a baby. They did not speak in “baby-talk”, but in fully expressed sentences. As I grew older, my mother would gently but promptly correct my syntax when I spoke to her. She worked across the street from our city’s largest public library and would often take me there to pick out children’s books. She made sure that I had a children’s library card, which I thought was the most magical thing ever as a child. I found out exactly how many books I could take out of the library at once, and I always took out the maximum number of books.
My mother encouraged my reading literacy by taking time to sit and read her own books quietly while I read my own book quietly. She entered me in reading challenges, offered by the library, which rewarded frequent readers with prizes. When I began attending middle school, my mother would allow me to type up fictional stories of my own creation and read them to her. My written literacy came both from my parents and from my Granny. I remember my Granny making me sit and practice writing in print and cursive. She would also work to correct my speaking errors and expand my spoken vocabulary.
My father influenced my spoken literacy considerably because he often spoke to me in his ‘legal’ voice. He was a district attorney for Philadelphia and later for Norfolk Virginia. Between my mother and father I learned a good deal about the difference between expressive speech and speech geared more towards argument making.
When I was in school, I drew largely on lessons in literacy that I had already learned from my parents. School was more of a reinforcement tool than the primary tool of my literacy education. Sometimes I think that this is the reason many children have such a difficult time learning to read and write expansively, they lack a foundation in spoken and written literacy from their family.
Another influence on my spoken and written literacy would have to be the neighborhoods I grew up in and the schools I attended. I have always been a part of a multicultural community and I think the literacy that develops in multicultural communities is very encouraging towards learning second language literacies. I found myself with Russian, Hispanic, Asian, and Italian classmates and I wanted to be multiliterate, though I had no idea what multi-literacy meant back then. As I moved up through school levels, I began to experience foreign languages like Spanish in middle school and French in the high school choir.
My high school established a four year language requirement so I took German for four years and I excelled in the language. I used it in school and I used it at home. Even though my mother could not understand the German language, she would listen to me when I spoke it to her. She praised and encouraged me, and she was a very big positive influence on my desire to learn and become proficient in other languages. In college, I tested into a high level of German and I continued to learn German. I even had a literature class in German dedicated to the story of Faust. In addition to German, I took an interest in Russian language because it was equally challenging to learn and I enjoy a challenge. I savored the process of learning to read, write, and speak in these strange new languages. My literacy is constantly evolving and growing through different experiences and interactions.