My Literacy Journey: Tracing The Evolution of My Skills

What makes one literate? What is literacy to you? Is it through reading a bunch of books? or…. Is it a product of our schooling? Learning that after the letter A is the letter B, after B is C and so on… or finding out this word is a verb and the other one is a noun; and that this sentence is grammatically correct and the other is not. Going through pre-school, kindergarten and on to high school to get a diploma, and then pursue a degree in college. Literacy can’t be just a product of schooling or the books we read. Can it? No. Literacy is a journey. A journey that is affected by every aspect of our lives. Where we’re from, what we’ve done, and who we associate with.

My name is Noora, and this is my personal literacy narrative. Like most people, my literacy skills grew with me at a very young age. It all started when I was born. I can’t remember a lot of things in detail, but I do know that I was brought to a place where soon I had to remember things. Things like recognizing faces, like my parents, siblings, and the rest of my family. A place where I had to remember things like my house. 

My first exposure to books was the children’s books that my sister would read to me and ask me questions about. Questions like “which one is a tree?”, then she would ask me to point the picture out. My very first two words to say were “daya”, and “baba” (Mom and Dad in Kurdish). I called everyone who took care of me and fed me daya and baba, until I realized I only had one daya and one baba. When I was around three years old, my sister would read me fairy tales and princess stories. I was obsessed with them. I wanted to be a princess. She showed me the different characters in the book. I was astounded by how beautiful they were. I began learning colors and started remembering what color each of their dresses and hairs were. Then I was at the age where I could speak and ask questions, for example: “what’s this?”, “why is this..?”, “why?”. I began to learn about new objects and was able to identify things. My mom then took me to pre-school. This was the first time I’ve seen school. I was so excited. I felt like I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was like my older sisters who were in high school at that point; finally grown and old enough for school! I began looking at books on my own and trying to identify the letters I saw. I learned to make friends and communicate with my peers. I started knowing which actions are right and which ones are wrong. This was the base of my academic and social skills. I then started memorizing my favorite songs and singing to myself in my room. I opened my closet, chose a gown, and wore my gown without my crown. I danced around my room and imagined the life of a princess. But this joy and excitement did not last very long. My family decided to move to Dubai, a city in the Middle East. They took me to school and put me in first grade. I truly hated it. The rest of the kids in my classroom spoke Arabic. It was incredibly difficult for me, a very social and active kid, to sit in a classroom not knowing a lick of Arabic. 

My very first exposure to Arabic literacy was in my Arabic learning class. It was me and five other foreign students who spoke French. They constantly spoke French to each other. So not only I was alienated from my Arabic classmates, but also from my Arabic program classmates. I was a social butterfly, an extrovert; without being able to speak Arabic, I just felt lonely and devastated. On the second day of school, I cried and said to my mom, “don’t take me to school today, don’t leave please.” I begged her to not take me to school, but she did and she left me there. Soon after I had forgotten about it, it taught me how to be independent from my mom and how to handle things on my own which is a huge part of who I am today. This motivated me to learn Arabic and as many other languages that I can possibly learn. It showed me the importance of literacy at a very young age. I then moved back to the United States and was able to see all my friends again and start the second half of the school year. I was happy again until my parents this time decided to move to Kurdistan. I was a little bit more educated and knew how it is going to be. It wasn’t as much of a surprise as it was the first time. Yet it was still very hard to learn the alphabet in a new language all over again. I started third grade in Kurdistan. I luckily already knew how to speak in Kurdish, but I was not as successful as the other kids in my class because of my lack of ability in writing and reading in Kurdish. I was a refugee in my environment because of my inability to write and read in Kurdish. I started falling behind. I felt like I was the only one struggling and that upset me because I’ve always had high expectations for myself. This just affected my relationship with any language or writing class. Until this day, I hate reading and writing, and it is always something that I don’t enjoy. This was like a road bump of my journey. However, my mom always told me to remember this quote, “the bumps in the road make the journey worth it.”

Once I moved back to the United States, I had almost perfected my Arabic and Kurdish speaking and writing abilities. I had learned how important literacy is. When I wasn’t able to speak the same language as my surrounding, I was incredibly lonely. I felt like I was barely part of the community. Now that I am literate in English, Kurdish, Arabic and Turkish, I have a lot more doors open to me and I can communicate with so many different people from different places. 

As seen from my literacy narrative essay, these events are only a few of the thousands that have shaped me as a learner, a reader, a writer and the individual that I am today. What events have shaped your literacy narrative? 

Works Cited

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