Language attitudes, genre and culture capital : a case study of EAL students' access to a foundation course in the Humanities at UCT

Bibliography: leaves 72-75.This dissertation explores the extent to which language and genre can be used to facilitate access for a group of first year students who have English as an additional language in the Humanities at the University of Cape Town enrolled in a foundation course. The use of the genre of the praise poem in the curriculum is used as a case study to address how the cultural capital that this group of students bring with them can be validated, the main aim being to facilitate access to the curriculum. In exploring students' attitudes to language and genre, data were collected mainly through the use of two questionnaires and interviews, where a qualitative analysis was done by drawing up the main themes which emerged and exploring the implications of these themes for the research question. The questionnaires aimed at identifying students' language preferences for academic writing (the choice being between their respective primary languages and English). The second questionnaire addresses the genre issue more closely by extending the question to include students' attitudes towards praise poetry while the first questionnaire asks about language preference in general. The second part of the research process deals with interviews, which I conducted with three of the students. The interviews were conducted with the aim of addressing the issues that emerged from the questionnaires; issues that I felt needed to be explored further in an interview context

An exploration of the impact of students' prior genre knowledge on their constructions of 'audience' in a Marketing course at a postgraduate level.

This is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in English for Specific Purposes. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in English for Specific Purposes, Volume 32 Issue 4, 2013. DOI: 10.1016/j.esp.2013.05.001.This article explores the development of audience awareness for two English additional language (EAL) graduate students making the transition from undergraduate Social Science disciplines into the professional discipline of Marketing at a South African university. The article examines the ways in which their conceptualisations of 'audience' shape their negotiation of the generic move structure informing a dominant genre within the discipline: the written case analysis. I argue that the students' struggle with realising the communicative purposes of the genre in their analyses has implications for how they engage with disciplinary theory within crucial moves. Data yielded by semi-structured interviews, reflection papers, as well as selected case analyses written by the students in the initial months of their postgraduate year illustrate how this struggle can be traced to a mismatch between their embodied understandings of the concept of 'audience' which are transported from undergraduate learning contexts, and 'audience' as prescribed by the communicative purpose of the written case analysis within a professional discipline. In making this argument, the article examines the ways in which an antecedent genre, the Social Science argumentative essay, contributes to this mismatch. The article concludes by outlining the pedagogical implications of the findings from an ESP perspective

Positioning (in) the discipline: undergraduate students' negotiations of disciplinary discourses

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Teaching in Higher Education on 11 Nov 2009 available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13562510903314988.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 post-colonial 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

A longitudinal study of students' negotiation of language literacy and identity

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies on 5 December 2011, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.2989/16073614.2011.633366.The article is based on a longitudinal, qualitative case study of 20 Social Science students at a historically 'white', English-medium, South African university. The participants in the study are all from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and/ or are speakers of English as a second language. Post-structuralist theory is used to analyse students' shifts in language and literacy attitudes and practices and in constructions of self over the course of their undergraduate years. The paper describes students' ambivalence as they attempted to constitute appropriate subjectivity and become academically successful within the discourses of the academy, whilst retaining connections to home discourses. The participants used their linguistic resources and social science discourses to process, rationalise and neutralise their ambivalence. The paper describes how they started off trying to maintain a notion of single identity, but over time became adept, self-conscious and less conflicted about shifting identities across contexts

Shifting language Attitudes in a linguistically diverse learning environment in South Africa

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development on 22 December 2008, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.2167/jmmd495.0.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

Negotiating between past and present discourse values in a postgraduate law course: implications for writing

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies on 12 Nov 2009, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.2989/SALALS.2009.27.1.6.754.This article reports on some of the findings from a year-long qualitative case study which explores the transition experiences of seven ESL students from the Humanities into postgraduate studies located in the Law and Commerce faculties at a historically white university. Here I focus on two of the students who were registered for honours in Criminology and explore the ways in which undergraduate discourse values manifest in their writing. Focusing on one course, Criminal Law, and within that the legal problem question answer (PQA) genre, I draw on Toulmin's (1958) model of argumentation to investigate how the students established links between warrants and claims in adapting to the genre conventions and modes of argument construction within their new discipline. The data reflect that, in addition to struggles around form, the challenges encountered by the students can be attributed broadly to a tension between their embodied habitus and the epistemological characteristics of the new discipline. One manifestation of this is in their challenges with negotiating the communicative purposes of the PQA where they explore available spaces for Social Science oriented reasoning in a genre shaped by 'objective' tests and legal principles. The findings underscore the importance of actively engaging students on how their prior literacies impact on the process of negotiating the intellectual and cultural demands of specialised genres at postgraduate level

An analysis of the textual practices of undergraduate and postgraduate novice writers in law

Criticisms in the media and in the law professions about the writing skills of law graduates have drawn attention to the challenges that novice law students experience in acquiring these skills at the foundation level. Our research project attempts to understand the nature of these challenges from multiple perspectives: firstly, by sourcing students' understandings of their challenges with legal writing through semi-structured interviews, followed by a close textual analysis of samples of their writing, as well as through feedback from teaching staff. In this paper, we present the findings of our textual analysis of their writing. We illustrate how their difficulties with legal writing manifest at the levels of content, concept and lexico-grammar and how the students' struggles with legal concepts had implications for their overall engagement with the content of the subject matter. At the level of content, students exhibited problems with the appropriate presentation of subject matter, achieving precision in their writing and showing evidence of an appreciation of what counts as tacit knowledge within the discipline, while at the lexico-grammatical level they struggled with tense, preposition and article use. The paper concludes by recommending some strategies for responding to these challenges while taking into account their resource implications

Successful students’ negotiation of township schooling in contemporary South Africa

This article draws on data from a larger longitudinal qualitative case study which is tracking the progress of students over the course of their undergraduate degrees at a South African university. For this paper, we used background questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with 62 first-year students from working-class, township schools who were first registered for Extended Degree Programmes in 2009. The article draws on post-structuralist theory on learning and identity to describe and analyse the participants’ perspectives on how they negotiated their high school contexts. We analyse the subject positions in which participants invested, as well as how they negotiated their way through social networks and used resources. Our data illustrate the ways in which students had to carry the burden of negotiating their way through home, school and neighbourhood spaces that were generally not conducive to learning. Nevertheless, participants consciously positioned themselves as agents. They were resilient, motivated and took highly strategic adult decisions about their learning. We argue that a focus on how successful students negotiate their environments challenges the pathologising paradigm of “disadvantage” that characterises research and debates in higher education. It also offers an additional lens for admissions processes and for providing appropriate intervention strategies in the tertiary setting

Distance Education as socio-material assemblage: Place, distribution and aggregation

This paper outlines some of the material assemblages that are formed in international distance education (DE) in Africa. It offers a first exploratory study of materialities in DE and how they potentially distribute and aggregate to form a network to provide education. Through the use of interviews, students lived experiences are explored to unpack the multiplicity of networks needed to overcome the de‐aggregated and distributed institution. The multiplicity of networks that form in DE brings challenges that question how spaces become connected and disconnected and how different materialities shape DE. The materialities in DE produce forces and effects, such as translocal and transmobilites that are more than just the human actor, but extrude materials, networks, and connectives that transform continuously. The interconnectivities of the university and home or institution and students are brought together through enabling technology, but infrastructure does not always have the ability for the facilitation of aggregation

The relationship between psychological wellbeing and work stress among healthcare workers

Abstract: Work stress has become a major global concern over the last decade, and healthcare workers are more vulnerable to stress because of the nature of their jobs and the expectations of society. It is becoming increasingly serious due to a variety of problems in the healthcare sector, such as inadequate personnel, high public expectations, long working hours, exposure to infectious and dangerous diseases, the possibility of misconduct, and continuing death and death experiences. Research on the support available to healthcare workers is sparse. This study therefore explored the moderating effect of co-worker support and perceived organisational support on the relationship between work stress and psychological well-being among healthcare workers. The study employed an exploratory quantitative research design. Purposive and snowballing sampling techniques were used. Participants included 239 healthcare workers, consisting of doctors, nurses and health administrators...M.Com. (Industrial Psychology