Literary history

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Literary History
Introduction
This paper explores my personal history with language and literature; my first personal encounter with languages in school, how I initially perceived the languages, how I came to develop an interest in languages, especially English and how that influenced my interaction with literature. More to that, the paper will explore on my current affair with English language, literature and writing and most importantly, how this combination has contributed in shaping my life today.
My encounter with the English language has been more or less the same as that of most of the people living here in America and other parts of the world where the language is the national language. Just like most people, I grew up in an English speaking family and therefore I also got to talk it. However, as I grew older and was enrolled in school, I realized that there was more to the English language than I had thought. First, I realized that speaking the language was not the same as writing it. Secondly, I vividly remember having problems with spellings and tenses as what I had learned at home; the manner of talking and phrasing sentences was totally different with what we were asked to do in school. My junior school grammar teacher nonetheless seemed to understand this problem that had affected most of us and she quickly strategized on how to make us understand the concept of English and how to avoid the mistakes we were making then. This is what she did; she assigned each of us a story book every week to read and narrate the stories during class sessions. We would then exchange the story books among our selves until each one of us had read all the books. Then she would request our parents to buy us another set of books to repeat the same processes again until she was satisfied that our English grammar was the standard she wanted. Miss. Catherine, as was her name, also organized word spelling competitions every Friday of the week to make us improve on our spellings and vocabulary. Actually, today I can confidently confess that those moves by my junior school teacher have contributed a lot in my level of the language today, needless to say my interest in the language too.
With such a firm English foundation that was laid by Miss. Catherine, my initial interaction with lite...