Your name:

Omar Mohamed

Instructions: Please respond to the questions that follow with as much detail and description that you can. The more you put into reflecting now on the complexities of your language and literacy development, the better off you’ll be in completing our major assignment for our first phase of this course. Take as much space as you need.

When it comes to your experiences with language (speaking and listening) and literacy (reading and writing), what specific moments in your life can you recall that are particularly vivid or that emerge as being significant to you? Yes, it could be an example from your earliest memories of learning to speak, read, and write (in school or elsewhere), but it doesn’t have to be. It could be a memorable encounter—a moment of tension, confusion, or triumph. It could be about experiences developing additional dialects/languages and advanced literacies (i.e., learning to speak/write in different peer groups, at school, at work, with family, online, in different locations across the nation or world, etc. Please select 3 moments to describe. Then, explain why each is interesting or significant.

1. During my childhood, till I was about 8 years old, I had a lisp and went to speech therapy for about a year. This experience helped me develop my speaking skills.

2. Watching Arabic shows and movies taught me to speak and understand Arabic (my second language) far better.

3. Experiencing different dialects of Arabic with my friends of Arab background but from different countries/regions.

What specific materials or artifacts (i.e., objects, writing, learning materials, pictures, video recordings, etc.) from your past can you locate/recall and that in some way represent a meaningful moment in your reading/writing development? This can be something like a journal or book, but also anything at all (e.g., a toy, piece of furniture, cereal box, art supplies, etc.) What memories and feelings can you extract from these examples you’ve gathered/recalled? Explain.

A movie I can remember from my past is Nemo, my favorite movie when I was a child. Constantly watching Nemo growing up helped me develop my speaking skills.

For better or worse, who and what impacted how, when, and why you developed your languages and literacies? Who in your family, at school, among your peer group, or in your community played a part? How did your particular situation or experience shape your literacy? That is, what sorts of issues, experiences, organizations, or life circumstances played a part? What kinds of languages and literacies did you gain from those people and your particular situation? How? Why? Explain.

For better, being around my siblings and family and hearing them communicate helped me develop my language speaking skills in both English and Arabic during my childhood, which enabled me to speak full sentences in 2 languages at a very young age.

In what ways do you see your language, reading, and writing capabilities as having social consequences or impacting your life circumstances—that is, what advantages did/do you have and what disadvantages did/do you face as a result of your language and literacy learning? 

I believe that developing my language literacy abilities during a young age was an advantage, since it benefitted me as I was able to more efficiently communicate with others.

How might your experience with language and literacy connect to larger social realities (e.g., of your life, family, generation, gender, race, culture, nation, geographic location, historical moment, etc.)? 

My experiences with language & literacy can be connected to larger social realities since knowing 2 languages enables me to communicate with many different cultures people from different ethnic backgrounds, since there are many countries which speak either English or Arabic as their primary language.