Responding to Roozen

There were a couple of quotes that I liked from the readings. One was Susan Hilligoss's "we need to recognize and acknowledge the private writing students bring to the university as valuable experiences with writing in their own right, but we should also ask students to explore its relationships to their larger literate lives, to view private writing as a substantial link in a chain or repurposings that has the potential to stretch into classrooms and workplaces."
Another was Roozen's comment that "because languages 'intersect' with one another on many levels at the same time, entry into a community of discourse must begin, not with a renunciation of the 'home language' or 'home culture,' but with those points of commonality that expose the alien within the familiar, the familiar with the alien."
The Roonzen piece was overall a very interesting article but it was surprisingly difficult to find a direct link to reading. Much of the data/observations provided were based on a student's writing rather her reading practices. The only obvious link to reading I could find was the fact that the student grew up surrounded by books. She was described as a bookworm and spent her early years reading and being read to. There were also some references to her positive experiences with her grandfather's storytelling. She was mesmerized by the way that he could paint a picture with his words when he was telling stories. Perhaps it was this characteristic that she was hoping to emulate -- she often felt that her writing style was being stifled in her English classes. During class discussion, my group eventually decided that the most important idea to takeaway from the article was the recognition and incorporation of student writing into the classroom.

I may be oversimplifying (or missing) some of the main ideas, but I felt that overall, the three articles were calling on teachers to be more aware of student choice and abilities as they come into the academic community. For example, Jalififar discusses the potential importance of hedging and that teachers should explicitly teach it in class. Fairclough argues that critical language awareness in instrumental for students to make the transition into the community and that teachers should also actively emphasize its importance in class. And lastly, Roozen argues for the inherent value of the literacy practices students often bring into the classroom. And