How do we play the genre game in preparing students at the advanced undergraduate level for research writing?

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Teaching in Higher Education on 18 November 2009 available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13562517.2011.530755.The study described in this article sets out to understand the barriers and affordances to successful completion of the short research thesis required in many advanced undergraduate courses or Honours programmes. In the study, the genre features of students' research projects and the criteria used to assess them were analysed and both students and supervisors were interviewed. The article focuses on one particular student from the case study and the findings provide in-depth insights into the complexities of genre acquisition in one particular department at a South African university, where writing and knowledge of the genre are often not taught, but must be acquired through a form of apprenticeship. The article concludes by raising some questions about how research genres can best be mediated in developmental contexts, where the teaching of writing may not be valued

"You would be a master of a subject if taught in Xhosa": an investigation into the complexities of bilingual concept development in an English medium university in South Africa

Readers must seek for permission to reproduce this workThis paper reports on a research project which set out to explore what happens when students at an English medium university in South Africa are given opportunities to negotiate conceptual understanding in their primary languages. The project employed a range of methods, including concept translation, multilingual tutorial groups, interviews and a survey questionnaire to develop a richer understanding of the possibilities for multilingual teaching and learning in English medium tertiary education settings in South Africa. By allowing the student voices in the bilingual tutorial discussions to illustrate the complex difficulties that students face when they negotiate understanding of new concepts in their primary languages, this paper develops a textured understanding of multilingual concept formation. In addition, the study has provided valuable insights into students' attitudes to multilingual teaching and learning which highlight the very complex relationships between language, learning and identity. Therefore this research should add to the body of research that has begun to emerge on shifting language attitudes and identity negotiation in the multilingual tertiary education context of South Africa (de Kadt 2005, Bangeni and Kapp, in press). The paper concludes by looking at ways in which English medium institutions can offer scaffolded support to ESL speakers who are learning through the medium of English

Tensions between textbook pedagogy and the literacy practices of the disciplinary community: a study of writing in first year economics

This is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of English for Academic 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 Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Volume 6, 2007. DOI: 10.1016/j.jeap.2007.04.003.This paper describes aspects of a research project which used linguistic and intertextual analysis of student writing to investigate the relationship between the academic curriculum and student voice in a first year economics course at a South African university. I argue that the discourses and practices of first year university economics textbooks provide a model of literacy practices which contradict many of the literacy practices of the discipline of economics. The first year economics textbook in particular, rather than exposing students to a variety of arguments and encouraging the development of critical reading skills appropriate for academic contexts, tends to be single voiced. This gives the impression of consensus in the discipline and it may encourage rote learning and plagiarism. This argument is supported with data from a research project

Student voice as a methodological issue in academic literacies research

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Higher Education Research & Development on 16 May 2012, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/07294360.2011.634382.Academic literacies research has been identified as an emerging but significant field in higher education. This article extends the discussions around methodology in academic literacies research by drawing on the current text and context debates in sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography. It uses illustrations from a recent academic literacies research project to reflect on methodology and to emphasise the importance of a prolonged engagement with participants' writing practices and experiences as well as the collection and analysis of a range of types of data to allow the researcher to become more familiar with the context. Methods such as allowing students to interpret their own writing, classroom observation and students' written literacy histories gave the researcher real insights into the way students made connections to their own familiar contexts in order to learn. The research also highlighted the manner in which communication between students and teaching staff can break down because teachers misinterpret student utterances when they do not understand or know the contexts that the students are drawing on. At the same time, however, the researcher sounds some caution about the use of dialogue in ethnographic methodologies because communication is a two-way process and allocation of linguistic resources has been unequal. Therefore, where students' resources do not match the context, they may struggle to communicate with the interviewer and to interpret their written texts. In these cases, interviewees who are first language speakers from privileged schooling backgrounds may be able to contextualise and interpret their writing more fully than interviewees who are speakers of English as a second or foreign language and who come from poorer rural schools

It's easy to learn when you using your home language but with English you need to start learning languge before you get to the concept': bilingual concept development in an English medium university in South Africa

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development on 13 July 2009. Available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01434630902780731.This article describes a multilingual glossary project in the economics department at the University of Cape Town which gave multilingual students learning economics through the medium of English, opportunities to discuss new economic concepts in their home languages in order to broaden and enrich understanding of these new concepts. The findings from this project illustrate how important it is that students use a range of languages and discourses to negotiate meaning of unfamiliar terms. The article responds to Mesthrie's (2008) caution regarding the development of multilingual glossaries, dictionaries and textbooks at higher education level in South Africa. It argues that translation of terminology happens inevitably both inside and outside our university classrooms as multilingual university students, in peer learning groups, codeswitch from English to their primary languages in order to better understand new concepts and this could be used as an important resource for building academic registers in African languages

Case studies of tutors' responses to student writing and the way in which students interpret these

This thesis examines tutor feedback on student essays to ascertain the extent to which these responses assist in teaching the academic and specific disciplinary conventions and to determine what is effective feedback and what is not. The investigation constituted an evaluation of a small sample of essays and the framework for this evaluation was developed from a study of current theories of literacy and language teaching. It was further informed by data gathered from interviews with students and tutors and questionnaires completed by them. This was done in order to establish how students interpret and react to feedback and to demonstrate the level of understanding between tutors and students in this mode of communication. The conclusion was that tutor feedback can provide a valuable method for teaching the discourse of the discipline. However, results of the study revealed that communication often breaks down because tutors and students do not share a common language for talking about academic discourse and because students may not have understood the requirements of the task. In addition, the study found that responses to a small group of essays in the lowest mark category and written by second language students, were very inadequate. As the researcher, I concluded that graduate tutors were not well equipped for the task of dealing with these weaker essays. I have made suggestions for future research in this area and I believe that the data from this case study will provide valuable ideas for training tutors for responding to student essays

Writer's stance in disciplinary discourses: a developmental view

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies on 12 November 2009, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.2989/SALALS.2008.26.1.9.424.An approach to writer's stance will differ depending on whether one looks at it from an analytic theoretical perspective or a developmental perspective. This article describes a training activity in the Writing Centre at the University of Cape Town which led the authors to evaluate the concept of writer's stance as used in corpus studies against the way it is used by academic literacy practitioners working in developmental fields. Corpus analysts tend to construct a general and theoretical conceptualisation of writer's stance, while academic literacy practitioners who work in complex developmental fields focus on what actually happens (or needs to happen) when individual readers or writers grapple with texts within particular social environments such as academic disciplines

Xhosalising English? Negotiating meaning and identity in economics

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies on 23 December 2010 available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.2989/16073614.2010.545027.As yet, very few South African studies have explored multilingual learning contexts in order to develop a better understanding of the role that students' diverse primary or hybrid languages play in meaning making in English medium universities.This paper will report on a project which set out to investigate code-switching practices in informal learning groups in the university and to distinguish the forms and functions of these code-switching practices. A particular focus has been to gain insights into the ways in which concepts transfer from one language to another in order to develop thinking on language and learning in multilingual contexts and extend theories of conceptual transfer. The particular focus of this paper is the pedagogic and social functions of this hybrid language and how its use might be tied to questions of identity. We look particularly at the way the tutor in the peer learning group used code-mixing to negotiate different identities in dealing with first a rural and then an urban group of students. We will also illustrate by means of our data ways in which English is being appropriated and Xhosalised, particularly by the urban group of students in order to negotiate meaning, identity and status on this campus and in the wider community

Book review: Strengthening Postgraduate Supervision. McKenna, S., Clarence-Fincham, J., Boughey, C., Wels, H. and van den Heuvel, H. eds. 2017.

Book review of McKenna, S., Clarence-Fincham, J., Boughey, C., Wels, H. and van den Heuvel, H. (eds). 2017. Strengthening Postgraduate Supervision. Stellenbosch: SUN Press