Literacy Narratives:
“How I learned to read.”

The way a book is read—which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book—can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it…Anyone who can read can learn how to read deeply and thus live more fully.

--Norman Cousins

Helen Keller Learns What Language Is
A chapter from her autobiography describing her encounter with Annie Sullivan who teaches the deaf and blind girl to communicate.

http://www.uwsp.edu/education/sslick/autobio/index.htm

links to 15 “Reading and Writing Autobiographies” of college students (future treachers)

varying in length from 700 to 3500 words.

http://ruthes-secretroses.com/Library/learned2read.html

The writer started in a one-room school house on the Canadian prairie, knowing German, but almost no English.

http://alc.stcloudstate.edu/howilearnedtoread.htm

Three college students describe their experiences learning to read.

http://www.betterendings.org/FASE/FASEInd/stread.htm

This writer struggled to learned to read because he was born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Effects (FASE)

http://www.ames.k12.ia.us/schools/edwards/Mr.%20Simser/rebecca.htm

a paragraph by a young Korean girl learning to read in English

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Douglass/Autobiography/

Chapters 6 and 7 of this famous slave narrative detail Douglass’s secret determination to learn to read and write.

http://www.doenetwork.com/shewrote/thornton/2002/jennings.html

D. Delreverda-Jennings, poet, tells about her beginning in a paragraph of an interview about her creativity.

http://www.dreamwater.net/edu/tiffp/vignette.html

A reflection on how the writer learned to read before going to school.

http://heart4kids.users5.50megs.com/photo.htm

An older woman explains why she read as a child, and why she reads as an adult.

http://dreamwater.net/edu/tammyeve/vignette.html

a paragraph by a female teacher who recalls being read to by her fourth grade teacher.

http://www.leslieann.homestead.com/vignette.html

This young woman recalls being read aloud to while potty training, and talks about he importance of parents reading to children.

http://lindaetheridge.homestead.com/vignette.html

She thinks she can’t spell because she didn’t learn phonics.

http://www.geocities.com/melaniecoffey/Vignette.html

This woman remembers being bored in reading class because she could already read.

http://www.republic.org/cant/Columns/Pakeha/10.21.html

A man talks of his thirst for reading and love of science fiction.

http://people.hofstra.edu/faculty/gerald_t_so/WSJVOICES/kristel.htm

This woman dislikes reading and remembers not liking reading in school.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/d/c/dcs181/learning_and_literacy.htm

A college-woman’s paper recounting the stages she went through in learning to read and write.

http://www.lifeisabigplace.com/booksandme.html

a female student essay on reading while growing up.

http://www.uwsp.edu/education/sslick/autobio/coming_full_circle.htm

A man recounts his slow start in learning to read, his speedy development, and reading to his 5-year daughter now. (1100 words)

http://www.rhizomes.net/Issue3/fernandezhtml/outsider.htm

commentary on Malcolm X and Richard Rodriguez and "the Self-Taught Man,” in the novel Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

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This page last updated November 19, 2004