Above all, this story about Malcolm X is just unbelievable. It is even hard to believe that Malcolm X learned how to read in prison without any previous education, knowledge of reading, and vocabulary as he mentioned in his essay. His essay starts with the reason that ‘it was because of my letters that I happened to stumble upon starting to acquire some kind of a homemade education.’ When he became increasingly frustrated because he was not able to express what he wanted to convey in letters that he wrote, especially those to Mr. Elijah Muhammad, his strong desire for learning to read must have started growing in his mind.
In addition, meeting with many erudite people, such as Bimbi and articulate debaters must have stimulated his desire for having knowledge through studying and finally motivated him to go into real action. Moreover, he realized that reading opens his mind to the world and to be able to know what is really going on out there. If he had had a weak will, he would not have studied that hard and could not have learned how to read. He must have had an extremely indomitable strong will and wanted to read to death. I truly admire his determination and he proved that nothing is impossible if you want something so bad and make every effort into it.
Here is the process of what he had done in order for him to master all vocabulary in the dictionary; consequently, he was able to read and write. Malcolm X depicts his learning process step by step which really fascinated me.
He says in his essay that he saw that the best thing he could do was get hold of a dictionary to study and learn some words. He was lucky enough to reason that he should try to improve his penmanship. First time, it was sad that he couldn't even write in a straight line. Then, he spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary's pages. He began copying into his tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks. After that, he loudly read back to himself everything he had written on the tablet. Over and over, he read his own handwriting. The next morning, he woke up thinking about those words and he could remember what many of these words meant. He reviewed the words whose meanings he didn't remember. He mentions that he was so fascinated that he went on and he copied the dictionary's next page. And he studied in the same way each time he studied. He had not only learned the new vocabulary, but also people, places and events from history while he had been studying new words from A to Z in the dictionary. He even praises that the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. He also read lots of books in his bunk when even the “lights out” came. I could hear him crying out for joy of reading from the part in his essay.
According to chapter 2 in our textbook, if thoroughly looking at his process of learning to read and write, there were several things which overlap with what Malcolm X had done, although he did what he could do under the circumstance; as an adult, he already had spoken control of English and it made learning to read much easier; next morning when he woke up and he visualized what he had studied; he had plans for repetition and repeatedly studied what he could not remember; on top of that, between Mr. Muhammad's teachings and his correspondence must have been a great way of using what he has learned, being another motivation, and reinforcing what is in his memory; he said there were some days he read for 15 hours, so he spent great amount of time and it built up his reading and writing skills; writing a letter to him regularly could be a typical writing fluency development; he had done speed reading, repeated reading in his way. Moreover, being familiar with spelling-sound correspondences can be seen as a receptive skill in that it relates to the receptive skill of reading. The productive equivalent of this part of the reading skill is spelling, which is part of the skill of writing.
I also tried this studying method like Malcolm X did since I had dreamed of becoming an English vocabulary master. I thought if I memorize all words in the dictionary, then I could become a master of English vocabulary when I was a middle school student. I really worked hard, but I stopped studying when I finished memorizing all A’s.
The meaning of being able to read and writing is like he tastes new pleasure of his life and opens a new gate of his life. In the last paragraph, he mentions that “prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college” and this sentence gave me a lot of thoughts.
Lee says: You anallyzed Malcolm's learning process and then compared it with your personal learning history, which was impressive. Thank you for the good work.
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