Academic Literacy Research Articles

Using Wikipedia to Develop 21st Century Skills: Perspectives from General Education Students

Purpose: The aim of the study was to find out how and why students use Wikipedia and what their attitudes are towards Wikipedia as a source of information for learning. Methodology: The article is based on a quantitative study in which 381 Estonian school children participated in filling out an online survey. The questionnaire included both multiple-choice and open-ended questions. Findings: Statistical analyses and responses to open-ended questions showed that students often use Wikipedia as a primary source of information, but that their use of the site for learning tasks is guided by teachers’ attitudes and perceptions towards Wikipedia. Students perceive Wikipedia as a quick and convenient source of information but are uncertain about its reliability. Under teachers’ guidance, they have learnt to search for information and to be source-critical, while more attention is needed to develop academic literacy, including both text comprehension and text composition. Value: As there is still very little research on how Wikipedia is used for learning purposes in general education schools, the results of the study contribute to further discussion on the potential of Wikipedia as an innovative teaching tool for different subjects.

In pursuit of social justice in South African higher education: Exploring the relationship between epistemological access and the development of students' academic literacies

In pursuit of social justice in South African higher education: Exploring the relationship between epistemological access and the development of students' academic literacies

Beyond the Written Word: Emerging Innovative Writing Practices in a Malaysia University Classroom

According to recent studies, there is a widening gap between traditional writing pedagogies and the demands of the digital age. It is evident that both teachers and students have expressed challenges in negotiating the complex standards of meeting the requirements of academic writing conventions. In the Malaysian educational context, there is a noticeable struggle to balance traditional writing approaches with the demands of the digital era. Given the unique practices observed in the university setting, this study aims to provide an in-depth qualitative exploration of changes in academic writing practices and innovative solutions to the identified challenges. Drawing on the theoretical foundations of Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory and Brian Street’s Academic Literacies, this study utilises semi-structured group interviews with four students and one teacher from a university writing classroom. Exploring the academic landscape in Malaysia, the findings shed lights on several key issues: the pressing need for adaptable teaching approaches, the importance of students acquiring and using digital skills, and the value of collaborative learning in achieving effective writing outcomes. This study highlights the need for a blended teaching approach to prepare the teachers, policymakers, and students for global writing standards. The findings are expected to have important implications for curriculum development, teaching approaches, and broader educational policies.

Introduction: Building decolonial learning and teaching through connecting to our diverse pasts: a case for ukuzilanda

The authors of this special issue – Nondwe Mpuma, Martina van Heerden, Khanyiso Jonas and Robyn Tyler - are part of a cohort of early career academics in the Arts and Humanities Faculty at the University of the Western Cape. We are joined by co-author Athambile Masola from the University of Cape Town. We are all fewer than 5 years into our permanent position as a lecturer at our institution. We come from Lubaleko, Kariega, Durban, eMonti and Cape Town and we speak isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English and isiZulu. Our academic disciplines within Arts and Humanities include Linguistics, English Literature, Sociology, Academic Literacies and Historical Studies. The foregrounding of our academic, geographic and linguistic identity positions within the body of this introduction is intentional.

Academic Literacy and Research Supervision of Teacher Trainees in Luanda/Angola

Introduction The teaching and learning process of any group or level of students is always dynamic and can change its characteristics depending on the context in which it takes place. Accordingly, the process of training teachers is also characterised by several changes which are dictated by the process itself and the context and conditions inherent in the same process. McLeod & Reynolds (2007: 1) contend that “… we are teaching and learning in times of overwhelming change – changes in the way we know, changes in the way we teach and changes in what is expected of us as teachers and learners”.

The Participation of Deaf Students in Higher Education in Brazil: Ethnographic Insights Into the Communicative Processes Involved in Navigating Academic Literacies

The Participation of Deaf Students in Higher Education in Brazil: Ethnographic Insights Into the Communicative Processes Involved in Navigating Academic Literacies

Trans-languaging as a Strategy for Promoting Academic Literacy: Students’ and Teachers’ Perceptions

Trans-languaging as a Strategy for Promoting Academic Literacy: Students’ and Teachers’ Perceptions

Conferência online entre pares: uma janela de oportunidade a favor do feedback para a escrita

Abstract The pandemic has had quite an impact on the way we teach and learn. During that time, Brazilian universities implemented remote learning for more than 15 months. While the initial move was a reaction to an emergency and saw the transposition of many classes to the virtual mode, the following months saw the flourishing of initiatives that enhanced learning by streamlining the use of digital technology. In this context, this descriptive qualitative study employs an exploratory multiple case approach to investigate the affordances in the digital context tertiary students use to facilitate engagement with computer-mediated peer feedback during a course of academic literacies in English at a university in Brazil. Data come from individual semi-structured interviews, online peer-to-peer feedback meeting recordings, and retrospective individual interviews with three pairs of students. The participants are tertiary learners who had two online meetings, using Google Meet, to discuss their peer feedback on two texts they wrote for the course over one semester. Results indicate that online peer conferences offer a multimodal communication channel where different semiotic aspects play a role in mediating written input. In addition, WhatsApp was extensively used for informal peer feedback. We conclude with pedagogical implications and suggest actions so that learners can harness the full potential offered by these tools.

UNDERGRADUATES’ CHATGPT DEPENDENCE AS AN EFFECTIVE TOOL FOR LEARNING IN SOUTH AFRICA

Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) has since late 2022 taken the world by storm because of its ability to facilitate many academic and professional activities. There is however a gap in research on the use frequency and dependence on this tool as an effective means of learning by students from linguistically and socio-economically challenged backgrounds in developing countries, such as South Africa. The quantitative study results presented in this article involved 50 first-year students who completed an online structured questionnaire using the ChatGPT tool via mobile devices. The findings revealed that many of the respondents were familiar with the tool which they used in all their modules. The respondents expressed trust in the tool that they often used. The overall evaluation of the ChatGPT tool showed that, with some control, Artificial Intelligent technologies have a significant potential to be used as a learning agent to increase business communication and academic literacy skills among students from a disadvantaged backgrounds.

Supervising Undergraduate Nursing Students on Their Bachelor's Thesis. A Qualitative Study.

The bachelor's thesis (BT) in undergraduate education is often an autonomous and individual assignment. It aims to demonstrate knowledge gained through education, to be an assessment tool, and to give new learning outcomes through working on the thesis. The process of working with the BT most often includes individual supervision. There is an absence of support for teachers supervising undergraduate nursing theses, which includes a lack of national or institutional guidelines, role definitions and research material. Given the lack of helpful guidelines, this study aims to explore what the teachers emphasize as important regarding their supervision of nursing students writing their BT. The study has a qualitative approach, featuring individual semi-structured interviews with nursing teachers supervising nursing students on the BT. Reflexive thematic analysis is used as the method of analysis. The analyses resulted in two generated themes, each with two subthemes, describing the patterns the teachers emphasize as important aspects of their supervision of nursing students writing their BT. The themes were "The pedagogical approach to the supervision" and "The advantages of the bachelor's thesis to the nursing profession." The teachers balanced different roles in the supervision of the students. They wanted the students to grow through challenging them, grounded in a relationship of trust and confidence. They were role models for how to be critical thinkers and incorporated critical thinking as a pedagogical implement in supervision, wanting to raise the students to become nurses who think critically. The teachers sought to combine clinical relevance with academic literacy to secure a new generation of nurses able to be a part of the future development of the profession. They wanted to equip the students with knowledge, skills, and confidence to speak up and communicate nursing. Last, the teachers combined their clinical and academic identities in the supervision of the BT.

Composting Grief Into Light: Building Agentive Healing Literacies with BIPOC Adolescent Writers

Responding to a general recognition that teachers are often ill-prepared to address the intersections of healing, literacy learning, and grief, this paper offers an overview of classroom practices and curricula that support the co-creation of containers of safety for students to explore grief while building academic literacies. Acknowledgment that grief with layers of trauma can often be a subtext of classroom life requires that teachers consider and adopt suitable manners of healing-centered and trauma-informed instruction. Drawing on the voices of students and on fifteen years of experience working with embodiment practices in the classroom, this article provides descriptions of tangible approaches and curricula that organically weave together agentive healing literacies with academic literacies.

Remote Learning and First-Year Academic Literacy during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Remote Learning and First-Year Academic Literacy during the COVID-19 Pandemic

학부 유학생의 학업 문식력 신장을 위한 방안 연구

This study began with the consideration of extracurricular program operation of A University. The previous semester's program confirmed that a balanced development of basic communication skills, socio-cultural adaptation skills, and academic abilities among undergraduate international students was required, and the process was re-designed as an integrated activity between BICS(Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills) and CALP(Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency). A survey conducted at the end of the program confirmed that this program helped undergraduate international students adapt to college life, understand Korean society and culture, and improve their communication, reading, writing, and listening skills. It was confirmed that the strengthening of these basic communication skills could have a positive effect on university students’ academic performance and further contribute to improving academic literacy.
 This study can be used as basic data for extracurricular programs for undergraduate international students. In addition, expanding the content and category of the program by linking the subject can help improve the academic literacy of undergraduate international students in various aspects. However, since this was a short-term case of a specific university, follow-up studies using longer-term cases should be conducted to accumulate practical data.

Evaluation of attitudes and behaviors of family medicine residency students regarding academic literacy

Amaç: Bu çalışma ile; Ankara ilinde Aile Hekimliği uzmanlık eğitimi alan hekimlerin akademik okuryazarlık ile ilgili tutum ve davranışlarını belirlemek ve bunları etkileyen faktörleri ortaya koymak amaçlanmıştır.
 Gereç ve Yöntem: Çalışmaya 188 aile hekimi uzmanlık öğrencisi katılmıştır. Ankara’da eğitim alan Aile Hekimliği uzmanlık öğrencileri çalışmaya dahil edilmiştir. Elektronik ortamda katılımcılara 23 soruluk anket ve Akademik Okuryazarlık Ölçeği (AOÖ) formları gönderilmiştir. 
 Bulgular: Katılımcıların %68,62’sı kurumlarında, %36,18’si kurumları dışında bilimsel araştırma konusunda eğitim almıştır. Çalışmaya katılan hekimlerin %59’u uzmanlık eğitimleri süresince hiç kongreye katılmamış, %67,61’sı hiç bilimsel araştırmada araştırmacı olarak bulunmamıştır. Çalıştıkları kurumda veya kurumları haricinde kurs, kongre ya da sempozyumda bilimsel araştırma konusunda eğitim alanların AOÖ puanları yüksek bulundu (p

Assembling a justified list of academic words in veterinary medicine: The veterinary medicine academic word list (VMAWL)

The assembly of corpus-based discipline-specific word lists for pedagogical purposes has recently been on the rise (e.g., Arndt, 2022; Fraser, 2007; O'Flynn, 2019; Yang, 2015). In order to cater to the needs of learners in veterinary medicine (VM) and for field-specific academic literacy, this paper analyses a reiteration of the Veterinary Medicine Corpus (Özer and Akbaş, 2023; hereafter the VMC), assembling a specified list of academic words used in published research articles (RAs) in VM. So far, VM has remained largely unexplored with the exception of Durrant's (2009) limited coverage of VM texts. The analysis was conducted using LancsBox 6.0, prompted to yield a list of PoS-tagged lemmas (P-lemmas) sorted by frequency (Coxhead, 2000; Yang, 2015) and dispersion (Arndt, 2022). The most frequent 1,000 lemmas for each content word category were collated into a candidate list. We then manually eliminated proper nouns and GSL (West, 1953) words. The final list, the Veterinary Medicine Academic Word List (VMAWL), contains 835 PoS-tagged lemmas (P-lemmas), a reiteration of which was produced by adding the types in Bauer and Nation’s (1993) taxonomy at the second level to test coverage. The VMAWL was profiled and validated against the four parent categories independently on AntWordProfiler (Anthony, 2022a) with analysis showing the VMAWL comprises 13.75 % of the VMC and diverges greatly from generic word lists like the AWL, NGSL, new-GSL, and AVL. The list can be used to develop teaching materials for EAP or ESP academic writing courses.

Academic Language Development and Linguistic Discrimination

Language use within Canadian postsecondary institutions reflects ongoing neocolonialism and the privileging of European and North American English varieties. This article shares student perspectives of interactions with faculty on themes of language development and linguistic discrimination, discovered in qualitative interviews using Appreciative Inquiry methodology. Participants’ stories reveal both appreciation for supportive practices that facilitate the development of academic language skills and frustration with linguistic discrimination. Practices valued by participants include using simple and clear language, creating a comfortable environment for non-native English speakers, honouring multilingualism, and providing supportive instruction in discipline-specific language. Students also identified experiences of linguistic discrimination that resulted in academic and personal harm. In students’ stories, a tension between encouraging academic language development while avoiding discriminatory practices emerges. Paths forward in navigating this tension while challenging colonial language hierarchies may include integrating pedagogies using an academic literacies framework while also creating space for translingual practices in classrooms and institutions.

Nursing Students' Perceptions of Academic Literacy Education - Reflections from the Swedish Red Cross University

Academic literacies refer to academic writing as social practices. This study describes first-term nursing students’ perceptions of the academic literacy education provided and its significance for their forthcoming training and clinical practice. Nine student nurses at the Swedish Red Cross University participated in semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed using latent content analysis. Two categories were identified: A challenging but rewarding step focused on the students’ struggles to become academically literate. A professional outlook targeted the students’ perceptions of the requirement to acquire academic literacies for their training and future clinical practice. The results provide insights of dichotomous perspectives among nursing students regarding their need to acquire academic literacies. Some of the students convey a resistant and sceptical view of adding academic education to nursing training. Others acknowledge the requirement of being academically literate, a competence sometimes hard-won. However, in their struggles, teacher guidance was requested; an appeal that needs to be met with creative solutions. Repetitive approaches by teachers combined with the use of student initiatives are proposed to enable improved academic literacy levels among the students.

The Development of an Academic Literacies Programme for Students in Britain and Beyond

Richmond’s Academic Literacies Programme (ALP) is a content-based form of instruction for university students which teaches critical reading, research skills, content synthesis, and writing and presentation skills. It is designed to empower all students to research and write effectively throughout their undergraduate studies. This article is a quantitative case study review of a British-American university’s ALP, examining student feedback across academic disciplines on specific taught ALP skills and comparing their improvement from 2014 to 2022. Chi-squared goodness-of-fit tests showed students valued research, critical reading, academic writing, essay structure, understanding academic honesty, using tutor feedback, and referencing skills; however, survey development and recommendation reports were not meeting student needs in their majors and so were removed from the programme. In comparison, in a follow-up review conducted in 2022, the skill of identifying research gaps was not effectively used or applied. However, independent group testing found the usefulness of skills at the lower learning level improved from 2014 to 2022, as did the application of skills at the higher level. This study concludes that ALPs are valuable for all university students beginning higher education research, regardless of first language or degree course.

A four-year trajectory of development from student to published researcher

Abstract This case study tracks a multilingual writer’s academic writing, in particular her engagement in the research article (RA) genre, over the course of four years as she moved along a trajectory from a novice graduate student to a confident disciplinary writer. The theoretical framework draws from academic literacies (Barton & Hamilton, 1998), highlighting practice and disposition (Bourdieu, 1990) as a way of understanding engagement with the RA genre. The findings, based on an analysis of interviews conducted with the participant, reveal three stages of the participant’s development in her disposition toward the RA genre, all interspersed with affect. Each stage is illustrated through examples from the interviews. The study’s longitudinal design provides a novel perspective that brings out a dynamic picture of the development of a graduate student writer. The findings are discussed in light of previous research and pedagogical implications are set out.

Using a functional multilingualism framework and online learning to develop professional repertoires and racial literacy for trainee mathematics teachers in London, England

ABSTRACT This article is a narrative case study of language provision for trainee mathematics teachers on a one-year initial teacher training course: a Postgraduate Certificate in Education in London, England. It draws on Heugh’s (2018) (Conclusion: Multilingualism, Diversity and Equitable Learning: Towards crossing the ‘Abyss’. in The Multilingual Edge of Education 2018 (pp 341-367) Palgrave MacMillan) description of Functional Multilingualism; Muscovitch’s (2015) Academic Literacy in Mathematics for English learners in The Journal of Mathematical Behaviour, 40, 43-62) to intertwine the development of professional language repertoires with the praxis of school mathematics pedagogy; and digital multimodal literacies to promote writing, professional language repertoires and critical language awareness. It models practices and tasks designed to improve outcomes in the Postgraduate Certificate in Education course and address the lack of confidence felt by trainee teachers when teaching multilingual classes. These develop safe spaces that allow for sharing of school practicum experiences and is a context for discussion of race literacy and other aspects of diversity and inclusion referred to in the Equalities Act (2010). Drawing on innovation over a four-year period (2017–2021) the case study provides a variety of starting points to develop consistency within the many initial teacher training routes leading to Qualified Teacher Status and for collaboration between schools and Higher Education Institutes during further two years of school-based training required in England before final recognition as a fully qualified teacher.