A Phenomenographic Exploration of Female Arab Second Language Writers’ Experiences with Information in an EAP Writing Course

©, Copyright © College Reading and Learning Association. Information literacy is a context-driven social practice that refers to the ways individuals experience information and create meanings regarding this experience. While much has been reported on information literacy in language learning contexts, not much has been written about how information is experienced. This paper reports on a phenomenographic study of how tertiary level female Arab EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners conceptualize and engage with information in an undergraduate EAP (English for Academic Purposes) writing course. Working with the assumption that experience refers to the internal relationship between an individual and the world, the study investigated the variation in the meanings students assigned to information as they participated in the course. Data collected via interviews and learner reflective journals over 16 weeks suggested that students experienced information in three ways: as an already existing entity, as legitimizing academic voices, and as creating connections between self and other. The study found that students’ experiences of information were grounded in familiar local Discourses as well as the assumptions and practices which the course made available. Students were information literate within the context of this particular writing course, adopting the identities and engaging in the practices that the course presented as desirable

Repositioning academic literacy: charting the emergence of a community of practice

This paper reflects on the experiences of the authors in planning and teaching a short-course in academic literacy for students enrolled in the first year of an education degree. By conceptualising tertiary literacy as a social practice and drawing on a sociocultural approach to learning, the members of the project team were able to move beyond deficit views of individual students towards a consideration of their own teaching practices and how they could best help students expand their literate repertoires. This approach provided opportunities for the team to focus on pedagogical matters and to chart its own emergence as a community of practice working on a shared problem

Troubling essentialised constructions of cultures: an analysis of a critical discourse analysis approach to teaching and learning language and culture

The thesis explores the ways in which a group of international students respond to a critical discourse analysis approach to teaching language and culture. It reports a qualitative case study of the implementation of two five-week programs in two existing classes in an ELICOS (English Language Intensive Course for Overseas Students) centre. In the field of foreign/second language teaching there are persuasive arguments for the introduction of an explicit focus on culture through language in ways that raise students’ awareness of cultural diversity and trouble the stereotypical, normative assumptions that underpin many cultural representations. Working from this perspective, I used critical discourse analysis as the basis of a program designed to contribute to the development of a critical awareness of culture with the aim of encouraging students to engage with new, hybrid and transcultural forms of representation, identity and social participation. The data, consisting of recorded classroom interactions, interviews and reflective student journals, have been analysed drawing on postcolonial theory. In particular, I focus on the discourses that constitute students’ responses to the pedagogical intervention and explore the subject positions they appear to take up. The research seeks to add to a growing body of work that explores the links between the deconstruction of cultural essentialism in texts and reconstructed understandings of difference and diversity. The present study showed that the use of the analytical tools of CDA in conjunction with ethnographic methods was effective in encouraging students to problematise the circulation of hierarchical categorisations in various text types and to recognise cultural hybridity and complexity. Some students demonstrated that a deconstruction of textual realities and the conceptualisation of alternatives led to the disruption of self/other margins and facilitated students’ negotiations of difference in the fluid, hybrid spaces in-between familiar and foreign, local and global discourses, relations and identities. Responses from a number of students suggest that some elements of the program constituted particularly effective components of a critical discourse analysis approach to teaching and learning culture and the thesis explores ways in which these elements could be developed in future programs. The thesis also incorporates a self-reflexive analysis of the research where I question my own role in introducing a particular way of approaching texts and viewing the world. In particular, some students perceived this pedagogical intervention as an imposition of my own ideals of appropriate methods of questioning and ways of defining and identifying discriminatory views and practices. This highlights the complexity involved in using the authority of teaching to make available to students a particular worldview with which they can resist authoritative worldviews. The data suggest that a critical discourse analysis approach and its attendant strategies for problematising and questioning the legitimacy of assumptions and claims in a text might have created, at least for some students, the conceptual space to turn a critical gaze on the pedagogy to which they were exposed

Repositioning academic literacy: Charting the emergence of a community of practice

This paper reflects on the experiences of the authors in planning and teaching a short-course in academic literacy for students enrolled in the first year of an education degree. By conceptualising tertiary literacy as a social practice and drawing on a sociocultural approach to learning, the members of the project team were able to move beyond deficit views of individual students towards a consideration of their own teaching practices and how they could best help students expand their literate repertoires. This approach provided opportunities for the team to focus on pedagogical matters and to chart its own emergence as a community of practice working on a shared problem