Moragh Paxton

A Linguistic Perspective on Multiple Choice Questioning.

This article critiques the over-emphasis on multiple choice testing in some large first year classes as well as the poor design and construction of many of these tests, and calls for the use of multiple choice questions as part of a broader and more diverse range of assessment measures. It argues that this kind of testing means that students are not given enough opportunity to develop communicative competence in the discourses of the academic disciplines they are studying.

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

Abstract 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 Mesthries (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.

Student voice as a methodological issue in academic literacies research

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.

Writer\'s stance in disciplinary discourses: A developmental view

An approach to writers 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 writers 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 writers 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

Abstract 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.

Supporting the teaching of the visual literacies in the earth and life sciences in higher education

ABSTRACT Internationally, there has been increasing emphasis on the teaching of the academic literacies, particularly reading and writing, in higher education institutions. However, recent research is highlighting the need for more explicit teaching of multimodal forms of communication, such as the visual literacies, in undergraduate courses in a wide range of disciplines such as the sciences, engineering and architecture. The research recognises that this is an area of academic literacy teaching that has often been neglected. This article draws on the findings of a research project which set out to understand both the multimodal literacy requirements and current practices in the teaching of these literacies in the earth and life sciences at a South African university. Three key themes are discussed: learning to see like a scientist, the importance of learning by switching between and integrating different modes of representation and teaching the conventions of representation in the sciences. The conclusion proposes ways for academic developers to work with staff to develop more explicit ways of teaching the visual literacies.

The potential of student narratives to enhance quality in higher education

Abstract University policies are increasingly developed with reference to students’ learning experiences, with a focus on the concept of the ‘student voice’. Yet the ‘student voice’ is difficult to define and emphasis is often placed on numerical performance indicators. A diverse student population has wide-ranging educational experiences, which may not be easily captured within the broad categories provided by traditional survey tools, which can drown out the rich, varied and gradual processes of individual development. There is no single tool that can be used to measure students’ experiences. This paper draws on findings from four narrative inquiry studies, carried out in the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, to illustrate how a narrative approach could be used to complement performance indicators. This provides a richer context for educators’ understanding of students’ experiences and for supporting and setting institutional agendas.

Economic Literacy: Understanding the Gap between Novice and Expert

The number of students applying to do tertiary economics courses reflects the importance placed on the need for South Africans to develop improved understandings of commerce and economics. However, failure rates in first-year courses are still disturbingly high. This paper gives a detailed analysis of the characteristic discourse of economics in order to develop an understanding of what the literacy requirements are for first-year economics students. It argues that students need to be introduced to the discourse of the subject and that their early examples of academic writing should be seen as a stage in their learning. It claims that the analysis of student writing can help tutors and lecturers to give useful feedback and to design curricula which might enable students to improve their writing and to learn more effectively. Finally, acknowledging the central role of language in learning, it explores ways in which a language workshop, complementary to the economics course, can assist students in the acqui...