week 2, Hannah Kim (Literacy Biography)

The development of my literacy To trace the development of my writing and reading, I have to start the story from the time when I was 1 year old. The reason is that it was when I started reading books. My mother says, she had read numerous books for me since that period of time. She told me it was really surprising that I really enjoyed reading and also was good at memorizing stories. According to her, I always asked my mother to read books for me and sometimes even did not go to sleep till 4 or 5 am. She was really surprised about this because she heard that kids usually fall in sleep when their parents read a book for them. But, it was not my case. Whenever somebody read books or heard me stories, it was totally impossible to fall in sleep.  Because I loved stories, I naturally started to read books all alone and as a result, I was able to memorize all the interesting stories that I owned. It was such a huge satisfactory for me at that time.                When I was 5 years old, one of my friends started to learn how to write Korean. Watching her, I really envied that, and my mother taught me how to write. However, what she taught me was just very simple words, such as dog, cat, Hannah Kim (which is my name). At that time, I also started my piano lessons and English tutoring. My mother said that after she taught me those simple words, one day, after the piano lesson, I read the letter from my piano teacher. This might be the first time I read the letter; I mean a long writing, not a word. At this period of time, I did not learn writing neither in Korean nor English. The reason was that although I started English at the age of 5, I did not put much effort because I was not so interested in learning languages. I was supposed to learn piano and flute and I planned to major in piano in the future. All I dreamed about was going to France or Italy to learn music. Therefore, what I had done was just reading Korean story books, nothing more. However, things were changed when I was in the 7th grade.                When I was young, my parents did not even think of my studying. They thought because I was good at music, it was not likely that I am good at studying. In addition, I did not study school subjects, such as mathematics or science that much like my friends did. However, when I went to middle school, my mother had me take an English examination held by a private institute. That institute was teaching students who wanted to go to foreign language high schools or international high schools. However, till today, I do not know the exact reason why my mother decided to make me take the exam, though. One thing which is only certain is that it was one of the most stressful experiences I have ever had because I was not ready for that exam at all. I just went to the institute to take the exam after my piano lesson. Although I did not know the most of the answers, I tried my best, and fortunately and surprisingly, I entered that exam and I was allowed to study in the foreign language high school preparation class. From this result, my parents realized that I can do a good job studying and decided to make me study. Therefore, I changed my future dream to go to foreign language high school from learning music.   However, studying was not easy at all. Although I was so fortunate to begin my new life, learning difficult English, mathematics, and science, that luck did not continued. I had to face the uneasy fact that I had learned nothing compared to another students in the same class. Because of that, I started to spend much longer time and effort studying, especially English. From this period of time, my English reading improved dramatically. It was so natural because I spent most of my daily life reading and listening English. From this experience, there is one thing I realized though- reading and listening is a different thing. When I became to listen well, reading was still a trouble in my English. Sadly, however, I did not learn writing at this period of time, even though I learned and studied English very hard. There was a good reason for this- all the questions that students are asked to solve when entering the foreign language high school, were all about reading and listening. There were no writings in the test. However, it does not mean that I do not have English writing experience at all.   When I started to study English really hard, I also had to prepare for TOEFL. And it contained essay writing. However, this fact was what I hated the most because I was afraid of writing. The reason was that I had no experience of writing something in English at all. Furthermore, there were not so many opportunities to write an essay in Korean classes at school. I think this was the major reason I was afraid of writing. Because I did not write much, and learn much about writing, I was always uneasy about writing and scared of writing, and therefore, I tried to avoid the writing classes all the time. Although I started to learn so called 'writing' for the first time, I was not able to create my own one. The reason is that, for my TOEFL writing, I began to memorize all the model essays provided by instructors which are considered to be good writings for ETS. However, this activity was not so strange thing in Korea because almost everybody who prepared TOEFL underwent this procedure. It was not related to personal writing ability at all- we had to do this just because we needed a high score in TOEFL, and learning the writing format was believed to be the best policy. With this experience, my image of writing became much worse, because not only being afraid of writing, it became even such a boring activity- no creation.   This is the development and history of my reading and writing. For reading, I always enjoyed and enjoy doing it because I love to read novels. Reading books written in English is the same story because I am thrilled when I read English novels which are not translated in Korean. Experiencing the original authors' expressions and words is always interesting. However, in terms of writing, I should say that I do not like it. During my life, it is true that I always desired to learn how to write well. When I saw writers who wrote impressive books and best sellers, they were the ones who had my admiration. However, writing has been always my challenge. I have been always afraid of it. For one thing but the most important thing, expressing what I feel and what I want to write as much as I want was always an impossible thing for me. Then, after putting tons of effort to achieve this, I ended up being frustrated. In addition, I always considered my grammar as my weak point. Although I wanted to write in sophisticated way, my grammar has been always a barrier. There were always too many errors in my writing, and that also ends up making me be frustrated and after all, made me give up and quit writing. In this class, I want to learn how to be comfortable when I have to write long essays, and how to deal with these. I want to be a good writer who can express all the things that I want to say and want the readers to feel.