Creating Student-Authored Learning Material: A Case of Kaaps-Speaking Engineering Students

Abstract

Most South African higher education institutions (HEIs) employ English as their de facto language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in most lectures and learning material. Despite the ongoing rise in student enrolment, most HEIs do not offer written materials to meet the literacy demands of students who speak Kaaps. In the context of engineering, these students struggle to solve “real-life” engineering problems and complete projects. This article adopts a qualitative research design to harvest rich data through interactive reading-writing activities while reading an English engineering text. The article focuses on how the participants recreated student-authored content by negotiating meaning with an English engineering text based on its linguistic, knowledge-, and text-based features to promote learning. A translanguaging literacy framework was adopted as a critical lens to engage the data. The article demonstrates how reading-writing exercises improved the participants’ literacy experience and recall, as well as their pedagogical and non-pedagogical skills.