Hernandez Salomon 1 Victor Hernandez Salomon Professor Leslie Wolcott, M.A.

ENC 1102 23 April 2014 The Story of My Literacy I first started to develop my reading at the age of four with the help of my mother, my first literacy sponsor, my first language is Spanish, so the first phrase I remember reading was mi mam me mima my mother spoils me, that phrase remains in my mind to this day, I remember the name of the book where I first read this phrase Nuevo Mi Jardn My New Garden, but many other details are blurry in my memory, it seems to have happened so long ago when I started learning how to read, so I decided to ask my mother for help trying to remember more about how my literacy started to develop, she related to me the following: You were a really good reader by the age of 5, when you first started first grade, you were one of the youngest in your class, and however I always received notes from your teacher expressing how good of a reader you were and how much you enjoyed your Spanish reading class. Going back to this book I realized that My New Garden and many other books that I used for reading and writing such as the book Jose y Josefina Jose and Josefina were written by ngel Daz de Cerio, without me even realizing he was a really important person in early development of my literacy. Writing however has never been strength, I remember my mother making me erase full pages because my handwriting was sloppy

Hernandez Salomon 2 and illegible, which made me despise writing even more, nevertheless it just slowly became second nature for me to writeonly when it was needed. Living in my motherland, Venezuela, I started to learn English, in great part because of one of my greatest sponsors, and I could say an institutional sponsor in a way, the Internet, I was meeting people online, and wanted to communicate with them, in many cases I used the little English I had learned by playing video games in English when I was younger. I thought I had it all figured out until, I, along with my family moved to the United States, I realized that the English I had learned, was not enough, mainly because I mostly wrote it, I was not used to speaking and hearing as much, shortly after moving, another institutional sponsor came to be part of my developing of my the UCF Center for Multilingual Multicultural Studies (CMMS), where I cursed as a student in an intensive academic English course, which allowed me to improve my English enough to be able to take the English that I required to join the University of Central Florida (UCF). As a student of UCF I had the chance to join a Study Abroad program in Brazil, knowing Spanish and the fact that I had learned English were supposed to make my learning of Portuguese easier, or so I thought, when I first got to Brazil, it was just like when I moved to the US for the first time, I could not understand, people spoke too fast, , specially my landlord, I could not understand a word of what she was saying, however I was able to read, reading was never so important, my roommate and friend was a huge sponsor of my learning and improvement of my Portuguese literacy, and without even realizing, after months of living in Brazil I finally realized that I was able to understand when it came to the toughest test, speaking to my landlord one more time, however I was

Hernandez Salomon 3 able to communicate, understand and respond to what she was saying. Learning languages is an amazing way to broaden my literacy and I plan to continue to do so.

Hernandez Salomon 4 Works Cited Daz de Cerio, ngel. Nuevo Mi Jardin. 2nd ed. Coleccin Angelito. S.A. de Educacin y Cultura Religiosa, 1983.