What are we thinking of? A critical overview of approaches to developing academic literacy in South African higher education

Abstract

In South African higher education, the development of academic literacy is often seen to be the responsibility of those working in the field that is known as ‘academic development’. This paper uses an analysis of submissions to the 2012 annual conference of the Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa, the forum most used by those working in the field to present their work, (i) to examine critically the way the construct of academic literacy is understood by practitioners in the field and (ii) to consider the approaches to the development of literacy to which these understandings lead.Key words: academic literacies, academic development, higher education,reading, writing, skills, practices