Reading and spelling throughout my primary education was never my strong point as I had great difficulty in learning and understanding the basic literacies. The teachers realised I needed help in this area and therefore their solution was to send me to a remedial reading class when I was in Year 3. I was in a group with about six other students in my year. I dreading going to these classes and found the work not challenging. I remember playing concentration and having to say words like cat and dog, words I was already familiar with. Most of my problems were to do with reading, spelling and grammar. I began to become very bored in this class, I remember sitting there rolling my eyes thinking this is way too easy but when I returned to my class literacy was too hard. Obviously this remedial class was not suited to my needs. My remedial reading experience links to Luke and Freebody’s framework, the Four Resources Model. I was being a text participant as I was able to bring my own experiences and knowledge to the class such as my reading and interpretation of texts however i could not decode and encode specific vocabulary, symbols and grammatical forms (Luke & Freebody, 2000). It is clear that I did not know what the codes of literacy were and how to use them effectively (Luke & Freebody, 2000). My literacy experience also demonstrates Erickson’s framework of the stages of psychosocial development (Snowman, Dobozy, Scevak, Bryer, Bartlett and Bichler, 2009). This personal development model exhibits between the ages of 6-11 a child is entering a point of Industry versus inferiority (Snowman el at, 2009). He describes “children who feel inferior may never learn to enjoy intellectual work, at worst they may believe they well never excel at anything” (Snowman et al, 2009, p 66). Erickson’s framework demonstrates how I was feeling at this point, that i was never going to be a good spelling and reader. A couple of years on I attended a reading group that I went to once a week at a different school this was highly beneficial and I began to improve immensely. This particular group was more suited for my needs; I was also with other students that had similar ability to me. The first book that I could not put down was Paul Jennings The Gizmo then Jennings other books followed. This book was a turning point for me as I actually began to enjoy reading which further developed my literacy skills. After this class i was able to understand the different literacy codes and as a result I was able to decipher the different texts have different purposes and these purposes shape the way texts are structured and formed therefore I became a Text user (Santoro, 2004 & Luke & Freebody, 2000).
