My work with the texts of graduate students in a distance teaching programme set me thinldng about two issues. Firstly, why do so many students -by no means only undergraduates from 'disadvantaged' baclcgrounds -fail to attain a level of academic literacy that enables them to do more than regurgitate textual information? Secondly, why do special programmes to help such students so often meet with limited success? In search of a systematic fiameworlc within which one might begin to conceptualize such pedagogical issues a little more clearly -with a view to their eventual empirical investigation -I made an extensive exploratory survey of some of the recent linguistics literature on, for instance, literacy, written communication and language teaching. In accordance with the views expressed by Stevens (1988:299) and Tannen (1988: 11), I hoped that linguistics might provide the "intellectual base" for addressing these issues. This paper, then, is a preliminary report on the literature survey.
The myth of textual autonomy -a probable causeThe myth of textual autonomy has been identified as a problem in "academic literacy for students" (Haas, 1994:45; Geisler, 1994:93). I will argue that the perpetuation of the 'myth' of the 'autonomous' text is, in fact, a leading cause of one of the most serious problems in academic literacy: namely that of the numerous prospective academic literates, http://spilplus.journals.ac.za 408 including graduate students, who never progress beyond an ability to retrieve and repeat information from academic texts. The reason, I will argue, is that the perpetuation of the myth impedes the development of the student's critical ability -a vital prerequisite for fuHy functional acadenuc literacy.
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