Literacy education personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I became interested in how reading is taught when my younger cousin, then in Year 3, asked me to help with a book she had been given. She could decode almost every word on the page, sounding each one out carefully, and still could not tell me what the chapter was about. That gap between saying words and understanding them stayed with me. When I read about the simple view of reading, which separates decoding from language comprehension, it gave me a way of describing what I had seen rather than guessing at it. I want to spend three years studying that properly: how children learn to read and write, why some do not, and what schools and families can actually do about it. My A level in English Literature has taught me to read closely and to defend an interpretation with evidence from the text, and Psychology has introduced me to memory, development and the difficulty of designing studies with young children. History has been surprisingly useful too, because it has trained me to ask who produced a source and why, which seems relevant when reading confident claims about teaching methods. I know that literacy education involves argument as well as practice, including long-running disagreements about phonics and about the place of wider reading, and I would rather study those debates than pick a side from a headline. My longer aim is to teach in a primary school and, later, to take responsibility for reading across a school.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A level subjects have given me different kinds of preparation. In English Literature I wrote a coursework essay comparing the presentation of childhood in Dickens's Great Expectations and Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which required me to plan a long argument, cut material that did not serve it, and think about how writers assume a reader's knowledge. Psychology has been the closest to the academic side of education. Studying Piaget and Vygotsky in the developmental topic made me look again at how adults scaffold children's talk, and the research methods unit taught me to be careful with correlational findings and small samples, something I try to remember when I read online summaries of educational research. For my Extended Project Qualification I chose a question about reading schemes, comparing the approach described in materials from my former primary school with the guidance in the phonics section of the national curriculum. I read Margaret Meek's On Being Literate alongside more recent government documents, which was a useful contrast: one argues for the reader's experience of books, the other for systematic teaching. I interviewed my old Year 1 teacher, with permission, about how she groups children for reading practice, and wrote up the limits of drawing conclusions from a single school. I was awarded an A. It also taught me to manage a long piece of work with deadlines I set myself, which I had not done before.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

For the past year I have volunteered at a Saturday homework club at my local library, usually working with two or three children in Years 4 to 6. Most of the session involves listening to them read, helping with spellings and occasionally persuading someone that a book about football counts as reading. I have learned to wait longer before supplying a difficult word, to ask what a sentence means rather than only whether it was read correctly, and to notice when a child is avoiding a task because it is too hard rather than because they are bored. One boy would only read non-fiction, so I started bringing books about volcanoes and machines from the children's section, and over a few months he began choosing longer texts himself. The librarians also asked me to help sort donated books for a reading corner, which showed me how much of literacy provision depends on unglamorous organisation. Alongside this I work Saturdays and some evenings in a supermarket bakery. It is not related to teaching, but it has taught me to be reliable, to keep working when the shop is busy, and to explain things clearly to new starters on their first shift. I fit that around college work by planning my week on Sunday evenings. At home I am the person who reads with my younger brother, who is nine, and I have seen how much difference a regular twenty minutes makes when nobody is rushing him. I read children's fiction for my own interest, most recently Katherine Rundell, partly because I want to be able to recommend books with some confidence.

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