Tracing the learning of academic literacy in a literature foundation course

Abstract

<p><em>Competence in academic literacy is still the main route to access and achievement within the university. First year students are expected to learn a number of discipline specific academic literacies with frequently conflicting and unarticulated uses of academic conventions. Through the analysis of the introductory paragraphs of one student in a literature foundation course, this article focuses on whether and how this student copes with the different demands presented by the simultaneous learning of different academic literacies. The analysis provides information about how this student built her understanding of academic literacy and her strategies for learning. The examination of her techniques and the need to explain why they are appropriate or not in a literature essay forced reflection on the thinking in the discipline that underlies such judgements.</em></p

Discipline-specific versus generic academic literacy intervention for university education: An issue of impact?

“…This small-scale, genre-based intervention was designed in collaboration with staff members of the specific discipline in order to establish appropriateness and adequacy regarding the "relationship between disciplinary purposes and writing conventions in the field of history" (Carstens & Fletcher, 2009:320). In a study that features the disciplinespecific humanities foundation course at the University of the Witwatersrand, Stacey (2009) elaborates on the characteristics of literature as a discipline-specific literacy, and traces the writing efforts of one specific student involved in the course towards acquiring an understanding of literacy (and more specifically, writing) practices that dominate in the study of literature. Van Dyk, Zybrands, Cillié and Coetzee 2009 Although some of the studies mentioned above are strongly situated in specific theoretical perspectives on what constitutes AL, many use an eclectic combination of theoretical perspectives as justification for their proposals on intervention design.…”

“…There is further an account of improvement in student writing regarding better marks achieved by students in a writer-respondent intervention (Bharuthram & McKenna, 2006) and the study by Stacey (2009) discusses mixed results in the improvement of only one student's written paragraphs. Other evidence primarily consists of opinion-based (perceptual) data gathered through questionnaires completed by students (Goodier & Parkinson, 2005;Granville & Dison, 2005;Bharuthram & McKenna, 2006).…”