PARK JIN-KYUNG , LIteracy Autobiography

My Literacy Story   200904082 Park, Jin-kyung Intermediate English Writing 1 (Tue 78)     I was a girl who loved to read books. As soon as I learned how to read Han-gul, I started to read books one by one in my house. My parents liked to see me read books, so they bought me the children's classic story set books. I liked all of them ,but I especially enjoyed Aesop's Fables and Andersen Fairy tales because they have a variety of funny characters and interesting story lines. As I was going on 11, I got interested in autobiographies of Korean great men. Their story made me impressed and inspired me to have a big dream. Having interests in books spontaneously led me to participate in school writing contests and I once got the silver medal for making a poem about flowers when I was in third grade in the elementary school. However, since I was so curious about everything and wanted to try many different kinds of activities like drawing pictures and playing the piano, I quickly lost my interest in books.   In middle school days, I began to keep a diary, but it was a little different from ordinary diary. I wrote it to exchange it with my best friends and this kind of "exchanging diary" was popular among young people at that time. Unfortunately, I had never done academic writing until I entered the university. Once I got in the university I had difficulty doing assignments or mid-term reports due to the lack of academic writing experience. Since my writing was not sophisticated enough and sometimes it was too simple, I not only had to read more of specialty publications and editorials in newspapers, but I also tried to make it a habit to write more often. Owing to these effort, I could improve my writing much more than before.   Meanwhile, it was in middle school when I learned English for the first time. While learning a foreign language was really fresh and attractive for me, I realized that I had such limited range of vocabulary and lack of understanding of grammar when studying in the university. So, I decided to study Toeic to improve those parts that I was not confident in. Through Toeic, I could learn a lot of vocabulary related to business world and could have detailed knowledge about English grammar. After I graduated from the university, I came to have desire to go abroad to study English more for myself and I chose Australia, which I could enjoy its lovely weather and beautiful environment.   There, I had so much fun meeting a lot of new people and at the same time I was happy as I could speak and listen to English all the time everyday. After 6 months of focusing on listening and speaking, I took Cambridge exam course, which is common exam in British English speaking countries. People said that it was sort of British version of Toeic, but It has speaking and writing parts as well as reading and listening parts. To pass the exam, I had to write 2 kinds of short essays and this made me frustrated since I didn't have confidence in writing something without reference books. I couldn't come up with something creative or critical and I had a big problem with organizing my ideas properly. Therefore, It took so long just to outline the story before my first draft. I practiced a lot to organize my thoughts quickly and I took all the advice that my teacher gave me. As a result, I barely passed the exam and I was so pleased.   But unfortunately, since I came back to Korea in 2002, my general ability of English has decreased dramatically. Now, I'm here studying English Interpretation and Translation as a tranfer student to make my dreams come true and I'm really struggling with my English, escpecially writing. I hope my English skills will be  improve and developed to the advanced level and I am going to keep working hard  to achieve my goal.