Lyudmila's Literacy Autobiography

I was born and grew up in Anadyr, Russia. I have a BA in Philology from the Buryat State University, Ulan-Ude. I am currently a MA student in TESOL at ISU. Speaking about my writing experience, I should say that my real journey as L2 writer started here in the U.S. Back in Russia, at the end of late 90s conserving and reproducing existing knowledge type of approach was favored. This kind of approach was applied in literature, foreign languages’ study, and history. We did write compositions where individual creativity and critical thinking was expected, but it was not very often. When I came to the U.S., my first class in English was TOEFL preparation. As the main aim of the class was to teach L2 students how write an essay in accordance with the Western approach to ‘good writing’, we were basically taught how to apply the same principles to entire essays. Texts were, thus, seen as composed of structural entities such as Introduction-Body-Conclusion. I enjoyed that class as the teacher was really empathetic, patient, and very encouraging. This intermediate step in my writing journey was an important moment as I had no idea the expectations in a mainstream English classroom. My next step was Composition 1 which was focused on both the writing process and content. As a writer, we were certainly expected to be independent producers of text. In addition, planning, drafting, revising, and editing were important writing processes of the classroom activities. The writing activities were organized around different topics of interest such as description of a place, the most memorable day in one’s life, religion, and so on. Schema development exercises were provided in order to generate ideas for writing and organizing texts. So we would read for ideas in parallel texts, react to photographs, and discuss Martin Luther King’s letter for example. Thus, Composition 1 was another important step in my writing journey. It was the most difficult one as we were expected to produce 5 pages per paper. I spent a lot of time just thinking about what to write, how to synthesize the material, what should go first, how much of information to include and so on. My paragraphs used to be quite clumsy and long. I had a lot of run-on sentences, lacked cohesion at times, and hated to write conclusions. Looking back at the torturous moments I had to go through, I still admit that writing is not easy for me. I still find myself struggling with analyzing and synthesizing the material. I find it difficult to choose a topic and do a research on it in terms of finding ‘the right material’. The latter always makes me somewhat anxious as I feel like a hunter who needs act quickly in order not to miss his or her game. However, after a year of studying at ISU, I can say that I feel much more confident in my writing endeavor. If I read several sources on a particular topic, I start putting it down on my draft. I don’t do an outline. I don’t know if it something that could help me greatly as I find myself looking through the pages of different articles in order to find that right sentence that I liked and that would provide excellent cohesion for my essay. Having said that, I want to say that I am right in the middle of my writing journey and still need a lot of practice.