- Title
- Acquiring academic reading practices in History I : an ethnographic study of a group of foundation year students at Rhodes University
- Creator
- Niven, Penelope Mary
- Subject
- Compensatory education -- South Africa English language -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- Foreign speakers History -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- Foreign speakers College students, Black -- South Africa Black people -- Education (Higher) -- South Africa
- Date
- 2013-05-29
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MA
- Identifier
- vital:2380
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007860
- Description
- This thesis reports on a critical, ethnographic investigation into the reading practices of a group of 14 foundation year students at Rhodes University in 2002. The university had identified all the student-participants as 'underprepared' for university learning: they were from poor, socio-economic backgrounds, used English as an additional language, and had been educated in township or rural schools. Using the Socio-cultural model of literacy (Heath, 1984; Gee, 1990 & Street, 1993), the study explores the culturally-shaped attitudes and assumptions about reading that the students brought with them into a tertiary learning context from their homes, communities and schools. It reports on their subsequent efforts to become academic readers in the disciplinary context of History. Framing Theory (Reid and MacLachlan, 1994) was employed to analyse the kinds of matches and mismatches that arose between the students' frames about the nature and purpose of reading, and those implicitly accepted as normative by teachers in the History department. It accounts for the students' difficulties in achieving epistemological access in terms of a conflict of frames: both the students and their teachers usually failed to recognise each others' constructions about the nature and purpose of 'reading for a degree'. The study'S critical purpose required that its potential for generating emancipatory consequences needed to be investigated. Thus the study reports on how both sets of participants began to reframe their understanding of academic reading, by describing the ways in which they reflected on the findings in the final stages of the research process.
- Description
- KMBT_363
- Description
- Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in
- Format
- 163 leaves
- Format
- Publisher
- Rhodes University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Humanities, English Language and Linguistics
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Niven, Penelope Mary
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