Master of Education (by coursework & dissertation) — Applied Language & Literacy Studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last February I emptied three boxes of donated storybooks onto my classroom floor and sorted them into two piles: English and isiXhosa. The English pile reached my knee. The isiXhosa pile was eleven books, four of them translations of the same story about a lost goat. My Grade 2 learners read and think in isiXhosa, and in two years they will move into English-medium instruction. That pile of books has stayed with me as a question I want to study properly: what reading material, and what kind of teaching around it, helps young children build literacy in their home language that they can carry into a second one?

I have taught Foundation Phase for four years at a primary school in Khayelitsha after completing a BEd in Foundation Phase teaching. My final-year research project examined the print environment in three Grade 1 classrooms during my teaching practice. I photographed wall charts, labels and reading corners, recorded which language each item was in, and then noted over two weeks which items children pointed to, copied or read aloud. The sample was small and I would design it differently now, but one pattern was clear enough to interest me: children engaged far more with handwritten class-made charts, often in isiXhosa, than with glossy printed English posters. My supervisor encouraged me to think about why, and that led me to read Jim Cummins's distinction between everyday conversational language and academic language, and his argument that skills developed in a first language can transfer to a second. It gave me a vocabulary for something I was seeing but could not yet explain.

In my own classroom I have tried small, careful changes. I write short decodable sentences in isiXhosa on chart paper with my learners, using names and places they know, and we reread them across the week. I keep simple notes on which children can blend syllables confidently by the end of each term. I am aware that these notes are a teacher's records rather than research, and part of my reason for applying is that I want the methods to do this rigorously: to design a study, analyse data honestly and understand the existing research on biliteracy in South Africa well enough to contribute to it.

On Saturday mornings I help run a reading session at our community library for children from several schools. Some arrive able to read fluently in English but stumble when I hand them an isiXhosa text with longer agglutinated words; others are the reverse. Watching the same child switch between strength and difficulty depending on the page has made me curious about how orthography and word length affect early decoding, something I would like to explore in a dissertation.

Not everything I do is about reading. I sing alto in my church choir, where we learn hymns in isiXhosa, Sesotho and English, mostly by ear and from photocopied lyrics. I also share an allotment with my neighbour, which mainly teaches me patience with spinach. Both remind me that people learn a great deal through repetition, listening and doing things alongside others.

I am applying for a Master of Education in Applied Language and Literacy Studies because I want to move from classroom intuition to evidence. I would bring practical knowledge of how Foundation Phase literacy is taught under real constraints of large classes, limited books and the curriculum's demands, along with a working fluency in isiXhosa and English. I hope to develop the research skills to investigate home-language reading properly, and to return that understanding to classrooms like mine, where the next box of donated books will still need sorting.