When i started the beginning of my degree and started my first Education course, Learners and the Learning process i thought i did not have the academic ability to continue. I was faced with weekly questionnaires, analysing the readings through learning journal, negotiating the complex multimodal requirements of Blackboard and online tasks. As Gee suggests “not all students arrive at school [or university] with the same literacies and approaches to learning” (Anstey & Bull, 2004, p.12). After having to answer questionnaires every week about what type of learner I was, this enabled me to understand the best way to approach new learning. I did apply and continue to utilise much of the functional, cultural and personal literacies embedded in everyday contexts. My cultural capital, as defined by Bourdieu was insufficient to meet the rigour of academic writing (Campbell, 2007). I undertook to expand not only my vocabulary, but to embed an implicit and explicit understanding of the appropriate contextual use of sophisticated language (Anstey & Bull, 2004). Therefore I decided to make a glossary of terms and learn the words and their meanings. This demonstrated that I became a self regulated learner as a result of this i was able to crack the codes of this academic vocabulary. After I masted decoding and encoding along with further study I began to identify and analyse texts, becoming a Text analyst (Santoro, 2004). I began to use the new words I had learnt as a part of my vernacular hence using them in my assignments as i has mastered the language required for academic writing.
