What is a Literacy Autobiography?

An autobiography is a story of a person's life that is written by that person, describing their early childhood, educational years, everything. A literacy autobiography is basically the same thing, just tuned in to something a bit more specific. My definition of a literacy autobiography is how a person's writes about their life according to how they read, write and speak in their life. They use how they communicate with other people to describe themselves as a literate being.

In the three readings, there were some examples of them being literacy autobiographies. Take Gloria Anzaldua's "How to Tame a Wild Tongue." This is a literacy autobiography because it tells and informs us about how she had to deal with people talking about how her Chicano Spanish was different from any other variation of the Spanish Language. She explains how stereotypical people can get sometimes when they hear something they can't understand fully.

In Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue," Tan talks about how her mother talks to other people through her. She also tells how she speaks to other people one way, and to her mother another way. Although it certainly is not telling us that we should communicate with our parents the same way, but that it is telling us about we all talk to most people differently than how we talk to our families. It was just how we were raised to do so.

Keith Gilyard's "First Lessons" was an autobiography, but I don't really think that it was a literacy autobiography. It tells us about his childhood days, sure. However, I don't remember it saying anything about how he spoke, read or wrote during those years. Although he did express the story with very vivid details, such as the fire scenario, that can catch a reader's attention pretty quickly. So I guess it does have some connection to literacy when you think about him and the details of his work.