Language and Literacy Map

My Language & Literacy Map

Mary K. MacDonald University of Kentucky EDC 533: Teaching Literacy Across Disciplines Spring 2023

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Instructions for navigating my microsite to discover my lingustic/literacy journey.

On the next page you will find my language and literacy map. Most items on the page are interactive, either by scrolling over them (like this one ) or clicking on the little badges (click here ). You'll also see icons like the one below, so you can get back to the map once you've read all that's on a certain page.

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My Language and Literacy Map

Heritage

From what I've been told, my family is mainly from Western Europe and the Brittish Isles

Literacy

I think my journey has been unique and different than most.

Learned Languages

Spanish: 2008 - 2015 German: 2013 - 2014 Hungarian: 2014 Russian: 2015 - 2019 Old Church Slavonic: 2018- 2019

Native Language

English is my first language. But two generations back, I have German speakers who emmigrated to the United States

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Literacy

When I was little, we had Accelerated Reader (AR) that we were required to do weekly in school as our take-home reading.We got prizes based on the amount of AR points we got too, which was a huge incentive. The final piece of my literacy puzzle didn't really fall into place until I started learning Russian. Because I was learning so many nuiances, I had to relearn the English language - this caused some huge growth as a writer and reader.

My literacy journey, as you can see, is very varried. I didn't really start learning anything other than English until my freshman year of high school. My mom was really big into teaching us how to read - it was really important to her because she loved to read. So, she read to me every night from the time I was little until I could read bigger books for myself. I think her example really drove my literacy forward because it made me want to read. Institution-wise, I think that my I thrived in spite of my circumstances. My school was really underfunded, so our quality of education was lacking. All the librarians were amazing though, so they made us want to read. I had one English teacher that truly made the difference - she taught us how to read strategically, and I could never thank her enough for that.

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How Heritage Affected my Literacy Journey

I can trace my heritage all the way back to Ireland, England, Scotland, and Germany. I think the biggest part of my heritage that had an effect on my linguistic and literacy journey is Ireland. The Appalachian dialect of English is heavily influenced by the Irish accent. And also the Cockney accent in England.The accent I have also caused me some literacy issues because phonetically, a lot of words didn’t make sense. Specifically, words like wallow, hollow, idiot, and toboggan.

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My native language and my literacy

As I began learning other languages, something that I realized was how ridiculous the English language can be. There's a heirarchy of adjectives that we just know because we're native speakers that other people have to memorize! The way our words are pronounced are often not how they're written. I am glad that English is my first language because of all these things - it must be incredibly difficult. I think as English speakers we have an advantage, literacy wise, because of how pervasive the language is - it's all around us constantly. Our movies are screened across the world, our music is played across the word. So, we always have the opportunity to be surrounded by our language - something that isn't always the case for people.

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Spanish and my Linguistic Journey

My first exposure to a trying to learn another language - and it was the only lanaguage my school offered. I wish I would have taken it more seriously

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I think learning German taught me to value rules and conventions in language. It also showed me that I should be grateful to not have to use such intense compound words for everyday things. But also, that the word for a face that needs slapped is "Backpfeifengesischt." Which may be useful someday.

How learning German changed my literacy journey.

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Hungarian

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This building is the Hungarian Parliament building in Budapest

In 2014, I lived in Kecskemét, Hungary for four months. I lived in an old Franciscan monastery While I was there, we had a twice weekly Hugarian language class. This was the most difficult language I tried to learn. But it was also one of the coolest experiences I've ever had. I miss it all the time and I've been back once. Hugarian is on the Finno-Ugrik branch of the Uralic Language tree, so it's way different than most European languages. It's not even part of the same language family. It's closest language relatives are Finnish and Estonian.

In 2014, I lived in Kecskemét, Hungary for four months. I lived in an old Franciscan monastery While I was there, we had a twice weekly Hugarian language class. This was the most difficult language I tried to learn. But it was also one of the coolest experiences I've ever had. I miss it all the time and I've been back once. Hugarian is on the Finno-Ugrik branch of the Uralic Language tree, so it's way different than most European languages. It's not even part of the same language family. It's closest language relatives are Finnish and Estonian.

I really think that my most influential thing for my literacy journey has been truly committing to learning another language. I had to relearn every part of speech and minute detail of English so I could use it in Russian. From 2015 - 2019, I studied Russian and it changed my life.

Russian was the key to unlocking true understanding of English

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Out of all the languages I learned, I honestly think that this is the coolest. Some people call it a dead language, but it's still being actively used in the Russian Orthodox Church. I spent a year studying OCS - the year that I learned it, we were the largest group studying it in North America! I was afforded so many amazing opportunities because I chose to take it - including going to the 2019 Medieval Slavic Summer Institute at the Hilandar Research Library at Ohio State (which is the largest Slavic special collections in America) where I studied a Znameny Chant Manuscript from the mid-late 1800s.

Old Church Slavonic

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This is a photo of an OCS manuscript.

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