Academic Literacy and the Languages of Change

Lucia Thesen is at the Centre for Higher Education Development, University of Cape Town. Ermien van Pletzen is Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town, and a Mandela Fellow at the W. E. B. du Bois Institute, Harvard University.

• Introduction - Lucia Thesen and Ermien van Pletzen; 1. 'Use your own words' Stella Clark; 2. Literacies in transition Bongi Bangeni and Rochelle Kapp; 3. Intertextual analysis: a research tool for uncovering the writer's emerging meanings Morgan Paxton; 4. A body of reading: making 'visible' reading experiences Ermien van Pletzen; 5. Change as additive: harnessing students' multimodal semiotic resources Arlene Archer; 6. Word, image and authority in the lecture Lucia Thesen; 7. Identity, power and discourse: the socio-political self-representations of successful black students at UCT Gideon Nomdo - University of Cape Town.; 8. The ESL context: an ethnographic study Rochelle Kapp.

‘This book is a stimulating collection of research-based papers that focus on academic literacy work in a particular setting—a South African university ten years after the democratic elections of 1994.  The contributors identify and analyse issues emerging from their teaching and integral to students' creation and recreation of texts in the ‘real world' setting of the University of Cape Town.  Together the papers form a carefully worked tapestry in which ‘place' and ‘space', `boundaries' and `boundary crossing' are threads that signify both change and continuities in the history and politics shaping the evolving identities of students, teachers and the institution...In the issues it raises and the questions it can provoke this is a book of potential value to every teacher and administrator in higher education...' ~ Mary Scott, English Academy Review, 2007