Prompt 2: Authentic Literacy

Multiliteracy goes beyond reading and writing in the classroom. It includes the culture and society print rich environment or lack thereof. In capitalistic societies, students are more prone to be exposed to commercial advertisement that targets a myriad of consumers in an effort to make a profit. In addition, students are often exposed to multiple languages and multiple modes of communication that includes visual and auditory or a combination of these. Consequently students should be exposed to real life experiences for reading and writing beyond the classroom in a collaborative effort from the community in an effort to build social capital and achieve literacy engagement.

Eggbert philosophy on the authenticity of reading and writing resonates with the multiliteracies paradigm. Eggbert believes that students should be allowed to interact with their environment in order to attain greater literacy skills. He expresses that students should be have extensive reading and writing practice. As they are exposed to authentic materials, students must them be instructed in learning strategies such as deduction and prediction in order to get the most out of the literature.

Blogging is a form of authentic communication that can be used by ELL in order to attain better grammar usage as well as to be able to convey messages and to negotiate meaning with English proficient students or people. ESL literacy programs would do well to implement blogs for their students as part of their curriculum.
Setting up the blog was not difficult, what has difficult was personalizing it. It was hard to read through the HTML to find out what codes needed to be changed to get it to do what I wanted it, I don’t think I’ve been quite successful yet, since the page layout is not what I envisioned it to be. Regardless of the minor page issue, I would like to use this blog as a tool to publish and express ideas on immigrant issues.