This paper draws on post-structuralist theories on language and identity to explore the shifting language attitudes of 15 'black' students over the course of their undergraduate studies at a historically 'white' South African university. All the students speak an indigenous language as their first language. Those students who have been educated in racially mixed schools are relatively at ease in the environment and are able to straddle racial and linguistic boundaries. Those who have been educated in working-class, ethnically homogenous schools enter the institution with a strong desire to preserve their home languages and home identities. For them, English is equated with 'whiteness'. The paper describes the process through which this equation is questioned as English and institutional discourses become more dominant in students' lives, and as relationships with their home communities become strained. By the time the students enter their senior undergraduate years, a shared speech code emerges. The authors argue that this code signals students' dual affiliation to English (and the cultural capital it represents) and to their home identities. In mixing languages across boundaries of school background and across traditional ethnic barriers, the code also signals students' shared group identity as first-generation university students in post-Apartheid South Africa.

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Abstract:This paper is drawn from a longitudinal case study in which we are tracking the progress of twenty students as they pursue their undergraduate degrees at the University of Cape Town. In this paper we trace two first-generation university students' changing constructions of who they are and the concomitant changes in their relationship to home and university over the course of three years. We describe their struggles to present coherent “home” identities and the ways in which these identities are challenged by both the dominant discourses of the institution and by rejection by their home communities. The research questions conventional notions that students from marginalized communities are either alienated from, or uncritically assimilated into, dominant institutional discourses.

IntroductionThis article is based on a longitudinal, qualitative case study (2002 to 2004) of 20 Social Science students at a historically 'white',1 English-medium, South African university. The participants in our study are all from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and/ or are speakers of English as a second language.2 They were (with the exception of one student) the first in their families, sometimes the first in their communities, to attend university. The project tracked their shifts in language and literacy attitudes and practices and in constructions of self over the course of their undergraduate years.There is by now a considerable body of literature which analyses the linguistic challenges and writing development processes of first-year university students from second-language/ marginalised/ disadvantaged educational backgrounds (see for example Clark & Ivanič, 1997;Herrington & Curtis, 2000; Thesen & Van Pletzen, 2006;Granville & Dison, 2009;Stacey, 2009). These studies have shown that becoming proficient in academic literacy is intimately connected to identity. However, aside from Herrington and Curtis' (2000) path-breaking longitudinal study of student writing in the US context, such studies have tended to be confined to the first-year experience. Our study has attempted to situate students' language and literacy attitudes and practices in time and space. We trace the felt experience of negotiating the accepted ways of 'saying-doing-beingvaluing-believing' (i.e. Discourses) of both the institution and home over time (Gee, 1990: 142). Our data reveal students' ambivalence as they found themselves straddling multiple, often conflicting discourses between home and the institution. In this article, we attempt to highlight key moments in students' journeys in order to illustrate how this process unfolds. Although our participants' trajectories through the institution are by no means uniform, there were discernable patterns in their language and literacy attitudes and practices that are intimately linked to their changing notions of self over the course of their undergraduate years.3

This paper is drawn from a longitudinal case study in which the authors have tracked the progress of 20 Social Science students over the course of their undergraduate degrees at a historically 'white' South African university. The students are all from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and/or speakers of English as a second language. The paper draws on post-structuralist and postcolonial theory to trace the process by which students position and reposition themselves in relation to disciplinary discourses over the course of their senior years. The students both absorb and resist the values of their disciplines. The authors argue that the process of writing in their disciplines is also a process of working out their own identities as they try to reconcile their home discourses with those of the institution and their peers, or in some cases, confirm or shed their home identities.