Family Literacy Community

After reading Heath, I started to think of the many different communities that I belong to, including family, floor mates, friends, and classmates. Most people can say that the majority of those communities are standard for anyone who belongs to those groups, even if the groups involve completely opposite types of people. In my life, I can say that my family has a very different literacy community than other families have. A main reason for this may be from the amount of people involved in my family, even just my direct family makes up eight. It is very interesting to see other families and compare it to my distinctive family. My dad’s side, a total of twenty five people, is a special circumstance that shares an interesting literacy with each other. For the most part, we all have a cousin or two around the same age that can communicate in their special way. The rules are pretty simple when it comes to the Vallely verbage, let loose and speak your mind. There is no thinking before things get stated. I would find myself a little embarrassed over the things said by my family if we weren’t alone on an island or in our little Vallely world. Everyone is educated and employed, but when the entire family gets together, it’s as if real literacy is thrown out the window and we create our own rules for oral literacy.

Becoming literate to understand the Vallely family is very difficult. There is no direct way of learning how to follow along with our conversations, but have to just give it time. After hanging out with the family, when we’re all together, foreigners will slowly learn our lingo. To become literate in the Vallely language is only possible by hanging out with the family long enough and understanding our strange human and uncontrollable, inappropriate outbursts. When it comes to our annual camping trip with the four brothers and sister with their children all together, trapped on an island, the worst, hard to understand literacy comes out. After hanging out with each other for a long period of time, phrases and other unique oral literacy begins to be remembered and loudly stated. Still to this day, I catch myself saying things created by my one uncle and cousin that no one else understands. After getting the experience of first meeting the twenty five Vallely family members and then hanging out with them to understand their unique literacy, is the time when outsiders slowly make their way in.