Personal Narrative: My Literacy Journey Of Learning English

My literacy journey of learning English began when I was in grade 2. I moved from South Korea to Canada knowing just basic Letter sounds. At my first elementary school in Vancouver, I was placed in the ESL program where they tested my English level and helped me improve my literacy skills according to my English proficiency. At the age of 7, I was in preschool level English and my ESL teacher highly recommended me to get a tutor. When my parents saw how much I was struggling at school, my parents decided to take me to the English after school program. In the after school program, I remember a teacher using the flashcards that had simple vowels written on the front and the example of the vowels incorporated into words. The teacher would repeat

When I entered the classroom to answer some of the questions, I noticed everyone within the class had different accents and speaking skills. Though I am not certain as to whether it was due to my not being a native or whether they simply felt as though it was okay to make mistakes, I did in fact notice that most of the students who seemed more confident in speaking in English seemed to be Asian individuals. I asked my classmates what they thought about having conversations with ESL students, and they all depicted the opposing, wherein Asian students were far more afraid to make mistakes in comparison to other cultures. One of the highlights of my conversations was the moment in which I had met a Korean ESL student, one of whom was interested in my language learning journey, having come to Canada and learning both the Korean and English language fluently. She was really interested in how I was educated at home, because she wished for her child to be proficient in the two languages as well, but was clueless as to where to start. I told her she should speak only Korean at home, because they were living in an English speaking setting as of then. For me, this conversation was meaningful, for I was able to share my experience, one of which this individual was able to relate and benefit from. She duly asked me, “What if your students don’t respect you because you are different from them?” The same question I had always found myself asking prior to my having entered the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina. I thus told her of my internship experience, for it was throughout this experience that I learned the following: if one cares and respects a student as an individual, no matter how different they may appear, the same student is going to respect their teacher in the same way. I noticed that although ESL students are still amidst their own language-learning