ABSTRACT
Unlike the language learning experiences in my school, my home was filled with extremely valuable literacy experiences that were crucial to the culture of my home and community. My siblings and I were afforded the opportunities to memorize and deliver speeches (or recitations) for church and community programs. My parents’ major contributions to our literacy development existed in the form of telling stories about their childhoods and encouraging us to entertain each other with our own. Subsequently, this led to my siblings and me telling our own stories (exaggerated versions of our parents’, initially) for enjoyment. There was nothing as entertaining as my older sisters’ renditions of poems such as “In the Morning” by Paul Laurence Dunbar and “Dreams” by Langston Hughes.
