My Language Literacy Narrative

As far as languages are concerned, I was first exposed to my Mother Tongue Algerian Arabic, then to French and Classical Arabic simultaneously, and later English. I stated French before Classical Arabic because French was more spoken by my uncles, and Classical Arabic usage was restricted to certain functions such as praying and reciting the Quran. Another often forgotten language is Amazigh. This is a minority language in Algeria. My first contact with Amazigh was during vacation when we travelled. In fact, this is the language of the two neighboring cities west of my home town Jijel which are namely Bejaia and Tizi Ouzou. That tongue was amazing because it was completely different from Arabic although we had a few vocabulary items in common. Later in middle and high school I became interested in that language because there was a taboo surrounding it. As an adult I also took German classes in my M.A. program because we were required to take another foreign language apart from French. I also took some Turkish classes because I was teaching in a private Turkish Language Center and had so many Turkish friends and colleagues.

Reaching the age of five, I was admitted to school like my siblings. I recall that I learned to read and write Classical Arabic in first grade and French in fourth grade. English entered my literacy scene in eighth grade. As soon as I learned to read, I came to demystify the written word because I could appropriate it. I started to read anything that I could put my hands on. We were lucky enough to have a panoply of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries in Arabic, French, and English as well as books in Arabic and French and even a book for learning Spanish. I used to spend my spare time reading through the dictionaries. What was amazing is that no one taught me how to use a dictionary. I say this particularly for the Arabic dictionary because to make good use of it, you should know the root of the word you are looking for and often the way words are inflected make it difficult to discover the root especially for a novice user of that language. I guess I must have learned this by attuning to my father using the Arabic dictionary.

Later when I was introduced to French at school, I had no learning difficulty because of my parents being both fluent in French. The French sound was familiar to me while the French letters were just amazing. As soon as I learned to read, I used to spend all my afternoons while my mother was asleep on the second floor of the house. In one of the rooms, my father kept some sort of a “library”. In fact it was a book case that was closed with a key. I used to go upstairs, unlock the book case, and start navigating through all the classics of the French literature ranging from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, L’education sentimentale (Sentimental education); Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (The flowers of evil), Ernest Hemingway’s Le vieil homme et la mer (The old man and the sea), to Honore de Balzac’s La comedie humaine (The human comedy), etc. I did not necessarily read, but being in contact with those books that were old and kept there was appealing. As I grew up, I kept going there and reading. My understanding of course was different but at least I had a secret and that was because I could read.

This is as far as reading in French out of school is concerned. For writing, I always thought that the written word is majestic. When I recall learning to write, I remember that my handwriting was not that good. It has always been legible but was never calligraphic like my brother’s; who I guess inherited it from my mother’s. This was the psycho-motor act of writing which had nothing to do with composing. As far back as I can remember, we did not use to compose a lot in elementary school. We rarely ever wrote very short paragraph. My mother used to help a lot. We both had to prepare lessons in advance so that when I went to class I could read the text fluently. In addition to reading fluently, I also had to understand any new word or grammatical structure. My mother used the Bescherelle book of French grammar. For pronunciation of course I had no difficulty.
However, composing was not focused in the classroom. This might explain why in middle school, writing essays with an introduction, body and conclusion was not that easy, but it was still not impossible. What helped in composing was reading, the more articles and stories I read, the more I could write. Of course, the more I advanced the easier it became so that for my exam preparation I always set a schedule without including Arabic, French, and English. In fact, I should confess that I never prepared for a language exam. Things changed t the university because I decided to major in English.

When I learned German, I remember that my teacher was obsessed by what she called “the correct pronunciation”. This was very frustrating because it simply inhibited all of the class. We tried to draw her attention to this fact but in vain. However, for my Turkish classes I often drove my teacher crazy because I used to compare the language system of Turkish with that of Arabic, French and even English. What helped is that many words were originally Arabic although sometimes the meaning was different.