Sponsors and Socioeconomic Status
Socioeconomic status most of the time paves the way for the degree of literacy abilities someone will acquire throughout their life. It has a tremendous impact on how a person’s reading/writing identity is formed. This is largely due to the fact that there are different standards of literacy sponsors for each socioeconomic class, as well as accessibility. The writing we do can take many different forms that represent different extensions of ourselves. We are able to adapt our writing to our surroundings, just like we can adapt our identity to fit certain people or scenarios. Writing is situational and writing helps shape ideologies and ideologies make up part of someone’s identity.

Literacy sponsors …show more content…
Sometimes these sponsors aren’t all equal, especially among the different socioeconomic classes. Each different socioeconomic group has their more common sponsors and different levels of accessibility to them. In the text “Writing for Their Lives”, Mahiri and Sablo go into depth about the lives of low-class young teens and the role that literacy sponsors in their everyday lives. This text follows the lives of two African-American teenagers who live in an urban area of California and attend high school there. First is Keisha, a fifteen-year-old who was “one of the most prolific and versatile writers [they] encountered during [their] research project.” (Mahiri and Sablo, 169). Keisha had been writing poems, songs, and raps since she was in sixth grade and has written over 40 pieces. Troy was another student they talked to, a seventeen-year-old boy who had been composing his own raps and songs and was hoping to someday become a professional rapper. During their study, Mahiri and Sablo figured out that Keisha’s and Troy’s motivation for their voluntary writing came from their own desire to stay off the streets. However, both of these young teens are considered incompetent of writing in their school …show more content…
This has greatly influenced my reading and writing identity throughout the years. I was born into a low-class family that consisted of just my mother, therefore the extent of my accessibility to information to literacy was whatever I was taught in school and any books that my mother was able to provide me with. We didn’t have access to the internet or any higher education institutes and I was basically housebound with no library or bookstore within walking distance. My resources were limited. Therefore, I used my given resources, my books. I would read any book I could get my hands on. If I had to I would read them over and over again and that was my source of entertainment. Since most of my books were fictional children’s book I would write fictional stories because it was all I knew. Later on, in my life when I moved to the United States by reading and writing identity completely switched because all of sudden I gained access to a number of new resources (because of my mother marrying into a wealthier class) I also had no choice but to learn a new language. I was still fairly young and suddenly I had all this access to pretty much any form of literacy I wanted, but also was learning English which opened a whole new world of literacy for