*Black Communication; Discourse Communities;

A study focused attention on the academic personas acquired by two AAVE-oriented (African American Vernacular English) beginning writers as reflected by their speech in informal settings and the style they employed in academic tasks. The study explores the degree to which literacy experiences (home and school) affect students ' lives. It was guided by the following hypotheses: (1) that AAVE-oriented students prefer to employ Black rhetorical patterns in their writing; (2) that students ' meaning is suppressed by the constructs of academic discourse; (3) that the distinct learning and language styles of AAVE-oriented students must be tapped to form a union between the discourse patterns of academia and the discourse patterns of the AAVE-oriented students. For the study, two students were selected from demographic surveys; they were interviewed for 90 minutes using a 3-step interview procedure. Writing samples were als