Languages and Arts Education

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Critiquing representation : the case of an academic literacy course in an engineering faculty in a South African university.
(2012) Bengesai, Annah Vimbai.; Mgqwashu, Emmanuel Mfanafuthi.
What does it mean to be academically literate? Responses to this question have led to an explosion of research in the field of applied linguistics, yet the diversity of definitions proposed in the literature for the concept of literacy per se indicate that it continues to defy consensus. Literacy, and specifically by extension academic literacy, must thus be recognised as a contested field, with different meanings for different people and inevitable tensions between those taking positions on or affected by its practical implications. Accepting its contested status, this study sought to explore student representations of academic literacy, academic staff representations of academic literacy and associated academic staff representations of students insofar as these touch on specific concerns of academic literacy in an engineering faculty. The purpose of this exploration was to determine how these representations permeate academic practice and inform pedagogical practice and attitudes to learning. This led to the research thesis, that dominant discourses produce certain practices which can lead to social exclusion/inclusion of students. Such a thesis, allows for an examination of institutional practices of teaching and learning. To do this, I employed a multidisciplinary approach drawn from applied linguistics, sociology and philosophy. Consequently, I drew on theories from James Paul Gee, Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein and Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger to understand the socio-cultural context where representation occurs. An understanding of these discourses and epistemologies also necessitated an approach that probed participants‘ versions of reality. Consequently, this research was premised within a Critical Realist ontology whose central tenet is the recognition of tripartite framework of reality. Within this framework, reality is comprised of the domains of the real, actual and the empirical. The domain of the empirical relates to perceptions of experiences, while the actual is concerned with events that produce these experiences. The real is the domain of generative mechanisms, which if activated, produce the events and experiences in the other domains. Data was collected to correspond to these domains, with critical focus on the analysis of underlying mechanisms which reproduce social reality. To establish how the real relates to the other domains, Fairclough‘s critical discourse analysis was adopted.
An investigation into postgraduate students’ experiences of academic writing: a case study of a university in Nigeria.
(2020) Akinmolayan, Emmanuel Seun.; Bengesai, Annah Vimbai.
The process of producing academic text, especially at the postgraduate level is challenging for non-native speakers of the English Language. Although there is a robust body of literature globally which has sought to understand this phenomenon; the same cannot be said about Nigeria, as academic writing in general and postgraduate academic writing seems to be an underexplored area. The available research has tended to focus on school literacy, grammar and diction with little attention being paid to the situatedness of academic writing as a form of literacy. Thus, there remains an apparent gap in the status of knowledge in this field in Nigeria, which this study sought to fill by examining postgraduate students‟ experiences of writing as a form of academic literacy. Specifically, the study explored how academic literacy and academic writing is conceptualised in two departments within a Nigerian University. The study was framed within a socio-cultural view, which sees academic literacy, including research writing as a socially situated practice. Theoretically, Gee‟s typology of d/Discourses, Bourdieu‟s cultural capital and Lave and Wenger‟s Communities of practices were used to understand students‟ experiences. Using a multi-paradigmatic approach, and Critical Discourse Analytical frame, this study revealed that there was no systematic focus on research writing in this university. The focus was rather on thesis as a product. When the process of writing was addressed, it was mainly in a deficit mode where students‟ deficiencies were addressed. In addition, the study also found the dominance of the traditional supervision model. Even though, some students indicated that they found this to be useful, the argument made in this study is that the approach does little to move students from the disciplinary periphery to an expert status in a community of practice. Therefore, it is recommended that, in line with advancements elsewhere, newer supervision models be adopted, which move away from the focus on the thesis, to a pedagogy of training students to be competent writers.

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Browsing Languages and Arts Education by Author "Bengesai, Annah Vimbai."