Valery Dominguez

Professor Adler
English 100 STACC #3637
September 29, 2014
Essay #2: Literacy Narrative
Literacy is defined as the ability to read and write, or at least thats what the dictionary
says. Everyone has a different take on what they define as Literacy.
In Malcom Xs Literacy Narrative, Literacy Behind Bars, he tells us of his life in
prison. Malcom X spent a long period of time in Charlestown Prison, a place in which he started
and learned to develop his understanding of the English Language. Malcom X went into prison
with no understanding of how to read or write but this did not stop him. It in fact motivated him
to change. As he says in the narrative, I saw that the best thing I could to was to get hold of a
dictionary to study, to learn some words. I was lucky lucky enough to reason also that I should
try to improve my penmanship.Penmanship simply is defined as the art or skill of writing by
hand or in other words, a persons handwriting. He would look at the pages in a book and might
as well have been reading chinese because he didnt understand what the words said, that and he
couldnt even write in a straight line, moved him to request a dictionary along with pencils.
The struggle of not being literate was overcome by the desire he had of being proficient
in his reading and writing skills.
Malcom X went through sleepless night of copying the dictionary and practicing his
handwriting. He wrote,In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet

everything printed on the first page, down to the punctuation marks. He did this for days until
he had copied down the whole dictionary.
The concept that Malcom X was hoping to depict through his narrative was that there is
no excuse for as to how someone can not improve and therefore, better their abilities to do
anything. If Malcom X that was like he said, behind bars learned to read and write in
handwriting, someone can deifinately improve whatever their ability is.
In my past educational experience, I grew up not talking to the best English, In fact, I
wouldnt say that I was the best English speaker. My mom would tell me of how i would
mispronounce words and have grammatical errors when I was speaking and often writing.
She would correct me and that is why I now speak fluent English as well as Spanish.
Many children who come to the United States speaking only Spanish fluently and English
partially, struggle when it comes to going to school where the teachers are being told to teach in
English. In this article I came across, I found that English Proficiency is very common the San
Joaquin. Four Valley metropolitan areas, including San Joaquin County, rank among the top
nine in the U.S. for the number of working-age residents who lack proficiency in English,
according to a Brookings Institution report released Wednesday.
Nearly two in 10 San Joaquin residents from age 16 to 64 have limited English skills more
than twice the national average which ranks the county eighth out of the 89 metro areas
studied. The Fresno region is fifth (22.8 percent), Bakersfield-Delano (20.4) is seventh, and San
Joaquin (listed as the Stockton metro area) at 19.3 percent is followed by Modesto (18.6) at
ninth.

The study is the first to examine limited-English proficient statistics in the largest metropolitan
areas across the country. It looked at data subsets from the Census Bureaus 2012 American
Community Survey. Respondents were asked how well they speak English: very well, well, not
well or not at all. Anything less than very well was categorized as limited-English proficient.
This comes to show just how much learning the English language is,not even people whose age
range from 16-24 are proficient in speaking English.