In this article, the author argues that educators need to expand the repertoire of identity categories by which they describe and explain the complex and often contradictory stances that students take in the acquisition of academic literacy. This position is based on an analysis of biographical interviews with 1st‐year students in a South African university in a period of intense sociopolitical flux. The interviews depict the interaction of a wide range of discourses, both those from past out‐of‐school contexts in which students were engaged and new university‐based ones. These interviews challenge the author to examine the discrepancy between the conventional categories by which students are identified and the way students describe themselves. She argues that this gap is in part sustained by critical literacy/discourse theory, which fails to attend adequately to the agency of individuals and the way they locate themselves in relation to discourses. It also assumes a coherent version of the “mainstream” to which students aspire, which is not borne out in the interviews. She concludes that it is important not to neglect the acting, reasoning individual if the range of identity markers is to be broadened in a joint process with students.

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Insights into the importance of the multimodal and increasingly visual nature of communication in everyday life challenges language and literacy teaching in interesting ways. This paper assesses an attempt to bring the analysis of multimodal texts of cultural interest to students into a critical literacyfoundation course in the Humanities at a South African university. I show how, against the intentions of the course designers, the course privileged cultural capital and reproduced patterns of privilege. I argue that acknowledging multimodal texts raises new and interesting questions about power and access. In highly vested, public sites such as described in this paper, new modes add new dynamics, with uncertain outcomes. I argue that, to harness the potential of multimodal approaches, more thought should be given to pedagogical issues, in the context of institutional discourses and literacy practices.

Lectures are central to undergraduate academic literacy practices, yet they are a neglected area of research. This paper approaches the lecture through the lens of ritual studies, and sheds light on aspects of academic engagement that usually remain hidden. The approach used here emphasises the dynamic (rather than static) character of the ritualisation process, and foregrounds embodiment and symbolic meaning. The data are from a study of lectures in the Humanities in a South African university, and include ethnographic reconstructions of ‘liminal moments’ in two different lectures, as well as material from focus group discussions with students after the lectures. I argue that lectures have been prematurely written off, and that with ritual theory as a lens there is much to learn about participants’ desire for engagement and about the relationship between micro processes ‘on the ground’ and wider institutional and political dimensions of academic engagement. I conclude by discussing the implications for academic literacies of lectures as a space in which the modes and meanings of orality rather than textuality are primary.

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