Understanding… #3

The person I interviewed was my roommate Saaya. She is from Japan, 20, and she is an international student!
What are you asked to do with reading and writing at this point in your life? And what are the difficulties?
-At this point in her life she is mostly doing writing for academic reasons. She is currently an English major at her university. She says in America her teacher asks her to be super detailed and has to write plus support what she has to say. Then in Japan she doesn’t have to be so detailed.
-Reading in English is difficult because there is so much vocabulary she doesn’t know, so whenever she doesn’t know a word she has to look it up. Which, she says takes a very long time and is very boring to do. Plus she says that the American teachers say they can skip something’s and guess the meanings of the words from the story. Then in Japanese she said that they tend to have to understand every sentence and if they don’t they stop the reading to try and understand. She explained how her teachers in Japan told her it is, “not understanding was a very bad way to engrave reading skills.”
.What do you remember of reading and writing before you began school? Who helped you with it and what was that like?
The earliest she remembers is that her parents took her to the libraries often, and she loved to check out a lot of books from there that her mom would read to her before bed. Especially her mom, who used to read to her as kid before bed.