Literacy Learning Experience

Aria Fazelimanesh    

09/10/2013

Every student experiences literacy learning in so many different ways and areas. Most Important and challenging literacy leaning experience for me was in learning English. I had to learn a lot of words  in so many different ways to be able to read and write. Since I didn’t like reading so much I watched a lot of movies and television but that only Improved my listening and speaking skills so when I had to take the TOEFL for College application I struggled with reading most of the time. I had to find a quick way to improve my reading skills. I took a course in high school called fiction writing in my senior year which was very challenging for me because I had to go beyond my imaginations and write about a totally unreal topic which was even hard if I did it in my first language.

One of the best way of learning new words and improving my communication skills in English for me was learning the word right after I heard it and use it as often as I can. For example if I were hanging out with my American friends and if they said a word that was unfamiliar to me I would ask them the meaning of it and keep repeating it to them as a joke.

            The quickest way for me to improve my reading was reading newspaper articles and taking out all of the common vocabularies and memorize them. You get a very short amount of time in TOEFL reading sessions and you have to read a long paragraph and answer more than twelve questions which means you have to read as fast as possible. So I would time myself in practice and try to read one passage in less than a certain amount of time and get a little bit more time on answering the questions.

When I took fiction writing course last year I was a little overwhelmed because I had to keep up with other American students who could easily write a fiction essay in less than 2 hours and I didn’t even know where to start from but since I had to push myself to do my best, level of my writing went higher in 1 semester.

Overall I think that Literacy learning can be different for everyone because people are always trying to find different ways to make learning easier and faster.