Peterson

In the article, “Past Experiences and Future Attitudes in Literacy” written by Ericka Peterson while she was in her first year at Utah Valley State College, Ericka uses a research conducted by Evans along with a similar research she conducts herself. Their research has to do with reading and writing including the literacy of students. Evans found his information from middle-class college students through various questionnaires and interviews about their literacy from in the past. To make the research different, Peterson took eight literacy reflections from students and she found their feelings and attitudes toward writing.  It was noticeable that good and bad experiences determine the way students look at writing. Peterson could see that students vividly remembered their bad experiences and could talk about them like it happened the other day, not years ago. She wanted to find a pattern between each literacy reflection.  She then interviewed several people of various ages so that she could get different viewpoints on writing from different stages of life. She believes, even when you are out of school, your literacy past still affects your life. In each Literacy Reflection and interview, Peterson saw that each person mentioned an experience with a teacher. The experiences were either, positive or negative but changed the way they looked at writing. A pattern Peterson found was that when someone was good at a certain skill and was positively brought to their attention by a teacher or others, it caused a positive reaction.  It gave that person more confidence and encouraged them to keep going. Peterson had an experience like this herself. Throughout high school she was self-conscious about her writing skills and did not want anyone to read her writing because she did not think it was good. She believed her teachers did not actually read her papers and just gave her an A because there was no feedback. It was not until college when her A’s continued and she received positive feedback from her professor that she realized she was a good writer and finally gained confidence. I felt the same way as Peterson in high school, I hated letting others read my writing. Peer edit days were awful.  It was not until senior year, my teacher finally wrote a paragraph on my essay saying it was really good and that she was proud of me.

Word Count: 390