Defining Literacy
I have always been curious as to how individuals become literate. This summer I began my questioning in a third world country, Cuba, who has between a 95 to 97 percent literacy rate. It has amazed me that many individuals can comprehend this complex phenomenon, and use it in life. I feel that literacy is something that is taken advantage of by people, imagine walking down the street and not being able to read the signs or receiving a letter in the mail, these days an e-mail, and not being able to read it; how miserable. These individuals who fit into this category are very susceptible to many disadvantages in the world. I will start off with my experiences in Cuba and some of the things that I discovered while conducting numerous hours of research, and also even more importantly talking with the people of Cuba. At the very beginning of the revolution, Fidel Castro launched a Literacy Revolution where the entire country would learn to read in a year. Castro felt the only way to run a country was to have smart and healthy citizens, and he did just that. The year of 1961 was and still is known as the year of literacy or education. Young students were taught how to teach the illiterate to read and write
When I was a child my teachers discovered that I could not read in second grade. I had learned to memorize the instructions from teachers, and some how get by on not reading out loud in class, and never really read. I remember feeling so left out when everyone else in my class begun to read books and I could not. I was tutored for that summer before going into third grade, and at the time, hated being tutored. However, once I picked up a book, and sat down and could read it all alone, I felt as if I could conquer the world. I had become a big person in my mind, for I could read. I could do what adults did, I could have my own books, and I had succeeded. I know what it feels like to not be able to read, and I know the enjoyment that comes with reading. It is very hard to learn to read, to become literate, but the world changes when you can read; it allows every individual to become their own unique person. Let's take a look at books, people have all types of preferences of reading, whether it be a comic book, to a mystery, historical, the newspaper, romantic, adventurous, religious, it's all reading, and it's your very own preference. Through this class we have also been able to conduct many hours of tutoring in reading with younger children in elementary school. I have had the privilege to work with two students whose native language is Spanish, and I am seeing first hand the struggles of these children in learning to read English. The skills that I mentioned above, reading right to left, sound/letter correspondence, visualization, word attack skills, and etcetera, are skills that these two children are facing. They are definitely literate in Spanish, but again, they must learn a whole new decoding system for the English language. I have also been in a Kindergarten classroom where I served as a teacher's assistant for two weeks. During these two week
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1267
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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