Literacy Narrative

Language and literacy have helped me overtime. It has helped me become who I am in terms of my speaking, reading, and writing. In this phase, I have learned that there are many moments in one’s life that have impacted their language and literacy allowing them to grow in such an area. I think this phase has taught me that writing, and speech works together because you need to be able to combine them if needed. For example, we had to turn our writing into a speech explaining the significance of our narratives and what it meant to us. 

When writing this, my audience were people who struggle with their language and writing. My audience were also people who get underestimated because of how they speak. To grasp my audience, I narrate how my language and literacy has helped me in my writing and helped me understand and analyze what I am writing. 

Things that have impacted my learning and writing are context and rhetorical situations. They both have helped understand how I need to format my writing and grab the audience so that they can be interested in my piece of writing. Rhetorical situations have helped me strengthen my writing and arguments. It helps me to allow the reader to remember important details in my writing. Context has helped me be able to include some background information in some of my writing pieces if needed. For example, this writing narrative, I had to include context for the reader so they can see how I struggled with my language and literacy and then later overcame it. Some ways that this phase’s assignment has helped me to achieve some of the course learning outcomes is through recognizing the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and be open to communicating across different languages and cultures and the understanding and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences. With the first course learning outcome, this phase has taught and showed me that many people come from different backgrounds, cultures and places, therefore we all aren’t the same and not taught to speak the same. Many people come with different accents, languages, and ways of learning English, so there might be moments where one is not understanding another, but that does not mean they should be judged or underestimated in their language and literacy of such, reading, writing, and speaking. For example, a girl in my class was saying how originally spoke Spanish so she couldn’t say certain things and her English teacher underestimated her saying that she didn’t belong in the class, and this was him being judgmental to his student thinking she doesn’t understand English and doesn’t know how to write.

Research Essay

In my essay, my target audience is White -American and ones who do not appreciate code-switching nor think that it should be morally accepted. To grasp my audience, I target them by expressing how they do not believe that code-switching should be allowed in society but prove that it should because it is how minorities express themselves. Therefore the language in my writing is informative so that they understand the many points I am coming from as well as the proof I use to make my point. 

This phase’s assignment has helped me to achieve some of the Course Learning Outcomes, such as locating research sources in the library’s databases or archives and on the Internet and evaluating them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias. Along with that, to compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation. During this assignment, I had to find sources that would make sense with my argument. I analyzed many journal articles in the Cuny Library, making sure they were credible and met the expectations of a good source so that I am able to efficiently use them to prove my argument. For example, I would use the CRAAP test taught in class to evaluate my information. Along with that, I would make sure to use sources that supported my argument, and then I would explain the use of the source and then summarize them so that my audience understands the point I am making along with the source, as well as why I chose the specific resource. 

The concepts/terms that have most impacted my learning and writing practices are purposes and audience. They have helped me grow in those areas of writing, especially during this phase because we had to pick a directed audience and make sure we stayed with it through the entirety of our essay. The concept of audience has allowed me to write something specifically for them which leads me to be more engaging with them because I know exactly what I am writing and why it is to them. During this phase, the purpose was included a lot. When explaining our sources, we had to include the purpose of the source, connecting it back to the argument. The concept of purpose has allowed me to be able to know that I should always express what is being discussed and why. 

Going through this phase and writing this assignment, some of the most meaningful insights that I have gained regarding language and literacy is that many of us code-switch in multiple situations, and sometimes are not aware of it happening because it’s not always controllable. In the account of my research, relating my topic to language and literacy, I have learned that code-switching needs to be understood more by White -Americans, mono language people, teachers, and those that just believe code-switching is inappropriate and not socially acceptable.