Literacy Events Research Articles

TRANSFORMING PRACTICE THROUGH AN UNDERSTANDING OF SOCIO – CULTURAL CONDITIONS IN THE CLASSROOM

Much of the debate on the teaching and learning of English and academic writing occurs largely from Eurocentric or Western perspectives on local contexts. This paper explores the role of the local English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in transforming the way English for Academic Purposes is taught and learnt, particularly in higher education settings in Malaysia. In order to challenge Western notions, ESL teachers need to know their local contexts and students well enough in order to explain the complexities that arise within an education system that is continually shaped by historical and socio-political shifts in the country. The purpose of this paper is to inform ESL and academic writing teacher-researchers that it is possible to transform practice by paying close attention to the complexities of socio-cultural conditions. Using action research methodology, the case study presented here illuminates and exemplifies the recognition and explicit inclusion of socio-cultural conditions within academic literacies in a tertiary English language class for engineering, computing and business discipline students in a Malaysian university. Three narratives are critically selected using the Critical Incidents Technique and examined from a pool of qualitative data which comprised student letters, student interviews and teacher diaries. Green’s typology of operational, cultural and critical dimensions of literacy events is used to analyse how socio-cultural conditions within and beyond the classroom can affect the kinds of literacy which are identified by the teacher and used to improve student engagement and performance in the language besides enhancing the quality of teaching and learning academic writing. Findings reveal the need for greater leadership support for grass root level decision-making by the ESL teacher and a deeper understanding of the use of mediation as a tool to maximize social interaction. Even traditionally used teaching materials for language teaching can be brought into connection with broader genres and conceptual ideas by focusing on social interaction in classes. An extensive use of the English language through social interaction with explicit attention to social and cultural ESL contexts proves to be a highly significant means to aid the rapid development of students’ English language learning, so that students can be better prepared to meet global challenges.

Development of early literacy skills: A Comparison of two early literacy programmes

Abstract The aim of the present study is to monitor the effectiveness of a new conception of early literacy curriculum (in force since September 2016) which provides – unlike the previous one – a wide range of purposeful literacy practices and literacy events. The study compares graduates of previous early childhood literacy curriculum (tested in June 2016) with children who attended kindergarten in the years 2016-2019. Several indications of early literacy development were selected especially those that are culturally more sensitive, i.e. are significantly shaped by the social environment offering the broad spectrum of reading experiences. Results show statistically significant relationship of story listening comprehension with comprehension monitoring and narrative production, especially at the level of understanding the implicit meaning. The most profound group differences were found again in narratives and implicit meaning comprehension. On the other hand, no differences were found in indicators of phonemic awareness, comprehension monitoring and understanding the explicit meaning. The results are discussed in terms of their implications to educational practice.

CRITICAL LITERACY, RESIGNIFICATION OF READING IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND RESCUE OF CITIZENSHIP

This study is directed to describe and analyze two literacy events from the narratives in the university context to understand how literacy and resignification of reading in Foreign Language occur. Therefore, the objective is to provide literate practices based on the tales of local writers and to promote citizenship and rescue local culture. The scientific work was supported by a qualitative interpretive research of an ethnographic value that was configured in interventional action research and integrated a master's project in applied linguistics, and then a doctorate. The instruments were elaborated according to the researched context, in this section was the descriptive memorial. The research shows that events of critical literacy in English from a social perspective supported by the genre short stories can favor literate practices based on the tales of local writers and foster citizenship and rescue local culture.

Literacy in Lockdown: Learning and Teaching During COVID-19 School Closures.

Across the globe, students have been away from schools and their teachers, but literacy learning has continued. In many countries, students’ literacy proficiency is often measured via high‐stakes assessment tests. However, such tests do not make visible students’ literacy lives away from formal learning settings, so students are positioned as task responders, rather than as agentive readers and writers. The authors explore the fluidity and diversity of literacy events and practices for students and their teachers observed during the recent period of COVID‐19 lockdown restrictions.

The Visual made Audible – Co-constructing Sound Effects as Devices of Comic Book Literacy in Primary School

This paper analyses and discusses ongoing comics literacy events where two 3rd Grade students and their teachers are working with comic books, focusing specifically on visual representations of sound. The purpose of the paper is to explore how these representations, as multimodal aspects of comics literacy, provoke literacy experiences in the classroom. Visual representations of sound come in different shapes and sizes, but are generally written outside of speech bubbles in bold letters. Using discursive psychology –allowing the researcher to view participants’ verbal and embodied actions as performing actions in social and situated contexts– the current paper analyses how pairs of students and teachers co-construct visual aspects in comic books, translating them into verbal sound and embodied action. Results show that embodied motion, sensation, and audible sound are utilized to interactively display comic sound effects to enhance the reader’s experience of the narrative. This is done as co-construction between adult and child through re-enactment of the visuals as real-life sound and action –also connecting this to other visual aspects of adjacent panels in order to make this meaningful. The paper argues that this challenges both teachers’ and students’ perceptions of what literacy can be and how sound effects –through the shape, colour and font of the graphic text– influence and enliven the comic narratives created in the classroom.

Students’ discursive moves in two distinct literacy modes: Comparing approaches in a grade 10 English classroom

This exploratory sociolinguistic study examined D/discourses and writing modes in a Grade 10 English literature classroom wherein students answered literature-based questions by means of both traditional and new literacies approaches. Studies conducted at the intersection of classroom instruction and online affinity spaces are still surprisingly under-reported in the academic literature; thus, the purpose of this small study was to contribute to new literacies studies research within classroom contexts by examining what happened when students responded to teacher-given prompts in two distinct modes: a traditional, essay-style response and a live, backchannel chat. This study compared the language use and some of the discursive moves that students made when composing written answers via both modes in order to provide insights for educators who may seek to use new literacies in their classrooms. Findings add to the discussion about what I see as the self-limiting aspects of traditional essayist-literacy (i.e. Academic English) favored by schools and the benefits of socially constructed literacy events facilitated by classroom-based online affinity spaces. Interestingly, findings suggest that this is not an either-or dichotomy, but that students in this study seemed to co-construct their literary analysis in the liminal space between Academic English and online chat discourse.

Beyond Language Classes: Semiotic Practices in PowerPoint Slideshows in Pharmaceutical English-Mediated Presentations

Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) has attracted considerable attention lately due to our increasing reliance on technology in education. This article contributes to educational research on CALL by considering the semiotic practices that surround PowerPoint slideshows. The article examines how a year-five female undergraduate in pharmacy designs her PowerPoint slideshow to represent and communicate knowledge in an English-mediated literacy event, i.e. pharmaceutical seminar presentations. While language plays an essential role in engagement in this event, the article seeks to highlight the role that visuals and writing plays in PowerPoint slideshows to help the presenter represent and communicate different aspects of meaning which reflect what she considers to be important for a successful engagement in a professional presentation. The investigation is carried out through a qualitative case study, using a social account of literacy and a social semiotic multi-modal approach to meaning making. Though this investigation is not carried within a traditional language class, it is used to highlight some of the issues that can help inform language education by drawing attention to the potential benefits that lie in exploring situated practices of meaning making in different professional and academic settings.

Unpacking Everyday Critical Pedagogy: Languaging Critique and Dialogue

This article explores how critical pedagogy unfolds in the everyday interactions between teachers and students. Specifically, Freirean constructs of critique and dialogue were explored in two key literacy events drawn from an ethnographically informed case study of one fourth-grade classroom. The events were first examined from an ethnographic perspective to understand how sociopolitical issue(s) were being critiqued (or avoided). These events were then analyzed again through microanalytic discourse analysis to explore how teachers and students jointly accomplished dialogue and critique through proposing and taking up of particular stances toward text(s). By juxtaposing these two analytic lenses, the researchers argue for an understanding of critical pedagogy, particularly the tenets of critique and dialogue, as interactionally co-constructed in the continually evolving, everyday talk between teachers and students. This article closes by considering the implications of this work for classroom-based literacy research that examines critical pedagogy.

An Overrepresentation of the State?

Book Review| July 01 2020 An Overrepresentation of the State? Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism, by Snaza, Nathan, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, 232 pages, $99.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4780-0415-8, $25.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4780-0479-0 Nathan Douglas Nathan Douglas Nathan Douglas is a PhD candidate in Catalan and Spanish literatures and cultural studies at Indiana University Bloomington. His current project, The Novel Bodies Politic in Spain and Catalonia, outlines the politics of bodies in contemporary Catalan literature against the backdrop of Catalonia’s ongoing challenges to Spanish state sovereignty. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2020) 16 (2): 277–279. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8233476 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nathan Douglas; An Overrepresentation of the State?. Cultural Politics 1 July 2020; 16 (2): 277–279. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8233476 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search Nathan Snaza’s Animate Literacies is a long-overdue invitation to think not only about what literary texts mean but also about the dynamics of how, for whom, and why they mean. In this book, the words close reading take on multiple meanings as the author sidesteps debates of microscopic symbolic interpretation in favor of training attention on the sprawling “literacy situations . . . where intrahuman politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography shape the conditions of emergence for [subjectifying] literacy events” (4). To this end, Snaza—director of the University of Richmond’s Bridge to Success Program—presents the compelling argument that we ought to “speak less of literate subjects . . . than of literacies . . . jacked into state apparatuses of control” (73). The goal of Animate Literacies, then, is made clear by the plural literacies of its title: to interrogate the ways in which modern states have... Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

A Review on Reader Response Approach to Teaching Literature at EFL Contexts

The review explores the philosophical basis of the application of Rosenblatt’s Reader Response Theory (RRT) to teach reading-to write of literary works in practical senses in EFL contexts across borders. Grounded in the integration of paradigm shift from text- to reader-oriented, critical pedagogy and literacy, and socio-constructivism, reader response-based teaching pedagogy places learners among the active meaning makers as members of a democratic classroom community while getting immersed in critical reading-writing (literacy) events. Moreover, this critical review highlights the possible classroom practices as framed by RRT principles that offer freedom and enjoyment in reading literary works to face the sophistication of varied modern 21st century educational web-based platforms that lead to the use of e-response journal and e-literature circles by means of e-peer-reviewing. Drawing on the current technology-enriched teaching media, RRT application is expected to benefit most EFL learners in gauging literature-based literacy development to sensitize their intercultural communication across global contexts. Moreover, recommended practical trends of RRT principles are presented in this review.

“Wait! I don’t get it! Can we translate?”: Explicit collaborative translation to support emergent bilinguals’ reading comprehension in the intermediate grades

ABSTRACT Throughout our targeted approach of explicit collaborative translation during small-group reading instruction in a bilingual education classroom, fourth grade emergent bilinguals employed the strategy to comprehend narrative text in a range of ways, similar to middle school students in reading instruction research. As students acknowledged the usefulness of their translation skills in constructing meaning with text, they also demonstrated increased initiative to engage in reading across classroom literacy events. Findings from this exploratory inquiry, including initial evidence of students’ developing bilingual identities of competence, suggest further research is warranted on explicit collaborative translation as part of a growing corpus of evidence-based translingual practices in bilingual classrooms.

Partnering with Faith-Based Organizations to Promote Positive Parenting: Example and Lessons Learned

We evaluated an early literacy initiative implemented in partnership with faith-based organizations. Heads of the initiative train church leaders to host monthly literacy events during which those leaders educate parents about child development and model dialogic reading behaviors while caregivers and their children follow along. A survey and focus group sessions with caregivers and church leaders indicated high satisfaction with the initiative, a reported increase in literacy-promoting practices among caregivers, and perceived gains in children's literacy skills attributed to participation in the literacy events. Extension educators can use or adapt elements of the initiative to promote positive parenting practices and early literacy.

MULTILITERACIES AND LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES IN CONTEMPORARY FANFIC LITERACY PRACTICES

ABSTRACT Using the lens of Street (1984; [1995]2014; 2003; 2010; 2012), this article firstly aims at discussing the contemporary literacy practices young readers and writers of fanfics engage in when inserted in the affinity spaces of fan literature. This discussion is based on the concept of ideological literacy proposed by the author and dialogues with the concept of multiliteracies, outlined by the New London Group (CAZDEN; COPE et al, 1996) and expanded by several authors such as Cope; Kalantzis (2000), Gee (2000), Rojo (2012) and Kleiman; Sito (2016), among others. These contemporary literacy practices, understood, therefore, as the social use of language, were studied from an ethnographic perspective (HEATH; STREET, 2008). Data was generated from the field observation on two fanfic self-publishing platforms and from literacy events occurring in rounds of conversation, within the scope of the Junior Scientific Initiation Project. (PICJr-049), promoted by a traditional federal institution of basic education in Rio de Janeiro. The social models of literacy used by participants in literacy events (HEATH, 1982; STREET, 2012) signals that designs are (re)shaped according to the interactional context of these participants. This article also proposes a reflection on the language ideologies underlying the discourse of the students participating in the PICJr-049. This analysis is oriented by Volóchinov’s concept of ideology ([1929]2017) and the notion of language ideology, as discussed in the studies by Woolard (1998) and Kroskrity (2004). In the analysis, it was observed that the students reinforce language ideologies anchored in the legitimation of the educated norm of the Portuguese language and in the privilege of literary canons in school literacy practices.

The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices

AbstractThe authors considered the capacious feeling that emerges from saying no to literacy practices, and the affective potential of saying noasa literacy practice. The authors highlight the affective possibilities of saying no to normative understandings of literacy, thinking with a series of vignettes in which children, young people, and teachers refused literacy practices in different ways. The authors use the termcapaciousto signal possibilities that are as yet unthought: a sense of broadening and opening out through enacting no. The authors examined how attention to affect ruptures humanist logics that inform normative approaches to literacy. Through attention to nonconscious, noncognitive, and transindividual bodily forces and capacities, affect deprivileges the human as the sole agent in an interaction, thus disrupting measurements of who counts as a literate subject and what counts as a literacy event. No is an affective moment. It can signal a pushback, an absence, or a silence. As a theoretical and methodological way of thinking/feeling with literacy, affect proposes problems rather than solutions, countering solution‐focused research in which the resistance is to be overcome, co‐opted, or solved. Affect operates as a crack or a chink, a tiny ripple, a barely perceivable gesture, that can persist and, in doing so, hold open the possibility for alternative futures.

Emergent bilingual students’ use of humour in digital composing: Academic and social work

Under dominant, autonomous views of literacy, students’ humorous language use during literacy events is often dismissed as ‘off task’ behaviour. Taking a languaging perspective, this paper considers how third-grade, emergent bilingual students’ humorous language use functioned in both ‘official’ and ‘peer’ worlds during eBook composing events across one year. Microethnographic analyses of humorous events suggest that students’ humorous languaging practices not only supported the work of composing texts but also helped them connect to peers and construct their own and others’ social positions within the classroom. Implications for pedagogy, including the importance of creating classroom spaces where students can talk and interact with one another while composing, are discussed.

Inhuman hands and missing child: Touching a literacy event in a Finnish primary school

This paper explores an inhuman reading of ‘hands’ with/in visual images of a Finnish literacy lesson. Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism and the ontological turn, we disrupt a metaphysics of presence, the temporality of progress and binary logic, to reconfigure the child in literacy practices as a sympoietic phenomenon, always already assembled in human and more-than-human company. We think with/in the concept of ‘touch’ as a method to reconfigure literacies as inhuman. We adopt Tsing’s (2015) art of noticing and present four ‘unruly’ encounters, touching surprising entanglements that e/merge when learning to ‘look around rather than ahead’. We notice entanglements of hand/writing, snow, flows of capitalism, mobile phones and a cardboard representation for our rethinking of literacies without assuming development and progress. Based on our analysis, we propose that moving away from identity, human exceptionalism and judging children on individual literacy achievement according to benchmarks that are external to the learning process itself renders learners capable in literacy practices.

Who Narrates Captivity?

Who Narrates Captivity? Rebecca Anne Goetz (bio) Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia. New York: New York University Press, 2019. xi + 233 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $75.00. Andrew Newman, Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacies and Indian Captivities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019. xi + 211 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. About sixty years before Mary Rowlandson wrote her famous book The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson (1682), Sarah Boyse also wrote a captivity narrative. Captured by Pamunkeys in March 1622, Boyse was sent home from captivity in 1623 "appareled like one of theire Quenes, wch they [the Pamunkeys] desired wee should take notice of." She observed her captors well: she "reporteth of a great deale of miserie that o[u]r People endure and not least Hunger in wch th'Indians also suffer extreame."1 The Pamunkeys held Sarah and eighteen other English women as captives, but the English were aware they were all alive because her husband John received "a letter from Boyse his wife."2 What information did she include in her letter? We do not know, because her letter does not survive. All that remains is a description of her clothing and her observations on the difficulties of life among the Pamunkeys. But I can begin to imagine what Sarah Boyse's letter might have told us. In addition to her descriptions of hardship and dearth, perhaps like Mary Rowlandson's narrative, Sarah Boyse might have told present-day historians much about Pamunkey politics, about Opechancanough's struggles to hold his confederacy together in the face of unceasing English violence, and the threat of starvation. We might have glimpsed Boyse's piety too, but perhaps without the puritan overtones of Rowlandson's later narrative. The possibility of Sarah Boyse's narrative is one we can imprint with all the things we wish we knew about Indigenous and settler lives in the wake of Opechancanough's devastating attack on English settlements in 1622. [End Page 488] I am able to subject Sarah Boyse to such conjecture because she left only the barest trace in the archive of early Virginia. The Virginia Company did not deem her literacy and her ability to describe her captivity worthy of extensive record. No one archived her (probably handwritten) letter. The men of the Virginia Company happily ignored Boyse's literacy, and thus her narrative. If a woman writes a letter, and no one saves it, does its once-upon-a-time existence matter? Was Sarah Boyse's unloved and unarchived letter a literacy event? Andrew Newman describes literacy events as "the particular activities where reading and writing have a role" (p. 3). In his new book Allegories of Encounter, Andrew Newman delves into one of the most commonly taught and commonly read genres in early American literature: the captivity narrative. In his close reading of the writings of several well-known captives such as Mary Rowlandson, Reverend John Williams, and John Marrant, among others, Newman explores these tales as literacy events, arguing that "captives read and wrote with the presumption that their captors did not—or should not" (p. 7). He describes his approach as "admittedly Eurocentric," and primarily about the "subjective experience of the colonists" who found themselves in captivity, able to return to their colonial homes, and likewise, able to communicate their experience in writing (p. 7). This framing suggests a more limited analysis than the book generally employs, and perhaps does a disservice to Newman's many insightful readings. His focus on settler captives aptly reveals how they used literacy, books, and the written word to distinguish themselves from their Indigenous captors. Newman asks historians and literary scholars to think about the nature of captivity narratives as both primary sources (history) and as texts (literature). The result is a thoughtful meditation on the role of allegory in how settler captives understood their captivity, but also how their captivity narratives expose the "ethnohistorical basis for representations of cultural contact" (p. 16). Newman is...

Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivity by Andrew Newman

Reviewed by: Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivity by Andrew Newman Yael Ben-Zvi (bio) Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivity andrew newman Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2019 236 pp. Many former captives wrote Indian captivity narratives to assert their belonging to the settler societies into which they were trying to re-integrate themselves. Andrew Newman’s Allegories of Encounter shows that reading played a similar social role during captivity, allowing captives to reconstruct discursive communal ties that approximated those their captors had severed. By reading books and other texts in captivity, captives could anticipate the reunification that writing would eventually confirm. [End Page 227] Newman analyzes a broad range of “literacy practices” in numerous captivity narratives, extending literacy’s centrality to settler colonialism beyond its familiar uses in land acquisition and the civilizing mission. If settler colonialism reproduces metropolitan sociopolitical settings, literacy bolstered captives’ faith in this reproduction as captivity threatened to frustrate it. Captors unversed in alphabetic literacy recognized and often respected its significance for captive settlers to whom they gave books and whose engagements in literacy practices they often accepted. By contrast, captives utilized literacy as the major means for distinguishing their historical positions and sociopolitical affiliations from those into which captivity had forced them. The book revises conventional treatments of literary allusions and intertextual references in Indian captivity narratives as extradiegetic afterthoughts or merely decorative tropes. It develops an intertextual history in which reading and the meanings with which readers invest texts become constitutive elements of captivity narratives’ plots rather than sources of stylistic rhetorical effects. Drawing on sociolinguistics and academic literacy studies, Allegories of Encounter explores various “literacy events” that enabled captives to perform “their participation in [the] discourse communities” from which their captors had separated them (3). The book’s “mode of inquiry” is deliberately “inductive, speculative, associative, [and] slow” as Newman traces what literacy might have meant for captives, its significance within its various discursive, cultural, and historical contexts, and its functions in shaping captivity experiences (194, original emphasis). The book expands the range of activities and capabilities included under the term literacy as well as Indian captivity narratives’ social investments and functions. This book history study reconstructs the discursive communities that settlers have created with literacy’s aid, analyzing the texts they read and sometimes wrote in captivity, and imaginatively re-creating the worlds that literacy brought into being. The first chapter, “Rowlandson’s Captivity, Interpreted by God,” analyzes the Bible’s role in the genre’s hypercanonized text, Mary Rowland-son’s The Soveraignty and Goodness of God (1682). Scholars have distinguished Rowlandson’s narrated experiences from the numerous biblical citations in her book, at times crediting Increase Mather’s editorial intervention for these allusions. Newman argues that multiple intimacies and [End Page 228] dependencies tie these biblical allusions inextricably to Rowlandson’s experiences. In “Rowlandson’s rendering,” he states, “the provision of a Bible” by one of her captors “was an experience” that “enabled” a “series of literacy events” that were as experiential even though they were anchored in specific biblical verses rather than in the particular geographic places she traveled (20–21). The dynamic interactions that settlers created to link textual passages to captivity’s locales subordinated the latter to the former. Chapter 2, “Psalm 137 as a Site of Encounter,” extends this analysis to various authors who used this seminal representation of the Israelites’ Babylonian exile as the definitive experiential axis of their own captivities. Newman argues that “[h]istorically, culturally, geographically, the circumstances of Christian captives in the Eastern Woodlands correspond to the language of the psalm so closely as to entail a partial collapse in the structure of the allegory between the biblical narrative and their own experience” (51). Rather than keeping those levels distinct, Newman suggests that Christian captives had to collapse them because the “first three verses of Psalm 137 conformed so closely to the circumstances of American captivity narratives” (60). The recurring adverbial phrase “so closely” emphasizes literacy’s potent ability to blur these boundaries. Newman subtly critiques settlers’ typological identification with biblical Israelites by acknowledging that “perhaps no...

Tricks of the trade or situated literacy – disciplinary reading literacy practices in vocational education

In upper secondary school vocational education in Sweden practices of reading is an integrated part of teaching in vocational subjects. This study aims to gain a deeper understanding of vocational reading literacy practices, and how reading literacy practices are recontextualised into upper secondary school contexts. Three subsequent research questions specify the study: What kinds of texts are used? How is reading done and talked about? What purposes for reading (why) emerge? Theoretically, the study draws from New Literacy Studies (Barton, 2007). Nine vocational teachers were interviewed regarding reading in childcare, technical, culinary, and industrial vocations. The informants were also observed when teaching in four student groups in three upper secondary schools. Analyses were made of text categories, genres (Rose & Martin, 2012), reading literacy events, text movability (Hallesson & Visén, 2018; Liberg et al., 2012), and reading types (cf. Rosenblatt, 1995). The results reveal a wide range of text categories, from general to specialised texts, specific practice-oriented reading events, reading types that differ depending on vocational context. A conclusion is that disciplinary reading practices in vocational contexts are complex and require critical readers. Therefore, further knowledge of reading in vocational education might contribute to the teaching of disciplinary reading literacy in upper secondary vocational education.

English-Mediated Presentations in Pharmacy: Exploring Literacy Practices among Saudi Female Undergraduates

Despite the complex nature of language learners’ needs, researchers on language use in tertiary education tend to look at these needs through textual analyses associated with written discourse more than any other aspect of language use. Because learners’ needs, however, extend to include recognizing the challenges and situated nature of language use among learners (Hyland, 2006), this article adopts a social account of literacy (Barton, 1994; Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Street, 1984; Pahl & Rowsell, 2012) to explore the literacy practices surrounding how year-five female undergraduates engage with English-mediated oral presentations in pharmacy at a Saudi Arabian university. The article offers a situated understanding of these undergraduates’ views of English as a considerable challenge in this literacy event to provide a more in-depth understanding of how undergraduates address this challenge. The article concludes by offering some suggestions as to how knowledge of the social practices surrounding learners’ engagement with reading and writing can help to inform EAP pedagogical practices.