By: Teressa Massedge 

Student’s literacy is heavily influence by their own identity! How a student interrupts the literature is based on their own literate practices. This means that each student can hold their own meaning of literacy because of their social and cultural life and their individual life experiences. A student is able to be multiliterate because they connect their literate practices and their identity to literacy.  Students have the ability to use their experiences and resources through their identity to comprehend a text. Within a person’s identity they are able to pull from inside themselves in order to engage in literate practices and to make meaning.  Students are able to draw from their identity being the lifeworld (real world) and their school-based world.

It is our job as educators to help our student to learn to use their own literacy identity. We must remember that each student does not have the same identity as another, making the comprehension of the text vary from student to student. As I was reading a book to my student when day, I ask the very common question, “What is the stories message?” However, when understanding a student’s literacy identity the answer to this question will always be different because each student identity is different. Each student’s social and cultural background and life experienced have shaped how they interpret literature and it’s important to help them explore their own ways of comprehension. Students are their own source of resource and they are able to understand literacy because of all the knowledge they have been exposed too. We must encourage our students to pull from their resources and grasps questions according to their literacy identities!

Going beyond..... : https://www.ernweb.com/educational-research-articles/literacy_identity_reading/