Academic Literacy and Student Diversity: The Case for Inclusive Practice

1     Academic Literacy and Student Diversity: What is the Problem?

Aim and Purposes

Over the past two decades, there have been regular reports in the media about declining academic standards due to university entrants’ low levels of literacy and numeracy. Students’ ‘appalling’ writing skills (Newman, 2007) have been making headlines in the UK press, and similarly, there is a long history of complaints about the quality of student writing in the US (Horner, 2014) as well as in Australia (e.g. Dann, 2008: ‘A sad loss of literacy down under’). These complaints have paralleled the expansion of higher education systems, and have some rather typical elements. For instance, they tend to be reported from the perspective of university lecturers who bemoan the loss of previously better standards and blame students for their inability to spell or use accurate grammar. They also tend to blame secondary schools for sending students with such deficiencies, and lament that universities have to make up for this lack of preparation through extra language or writing classes.

This discourse of deficiency and remediation is disturbing for several reasons. One is that widening access to higher education has obviously not been accompanied by a sufficient understanding that student populations are now more diverse and less prepared for academic study and therefore need more support when settling into university than the highly selected student intakes in previous elite systems. Another reason is that the difficulties students encounter at university tend to be trivialised as language problems at the level of grammar and spelling, when in fact numerous studies have revealed that students struggle with understanding the epistemology and ways of communication of their discipline (e.g. Lillis, 2001; Kapp & Bangeni, 2009). Lea and Street (1998), for instance, noticed that lecturers commented on surface errors in syntax or structure when they were unable to pinpoint underlying epistemological problems. This failure to appreciate the nature of the challenges students face leads in turn to inadequate measures of remediation which only cater for subsets of the student populations. As I will show in Chapter 3, language support is often only on offer for non-native speakers of English, whilst some limited and skills-oriented provision is available for the rest. This means that while higher education has become more inclusive, the support provision remains exclusive. A further negative aspect of this remedial approach is that it is entirely focused on student writing, neglecting the fact that writing is only the end product of a far more comprehensive and complex process that entails dealing with specific information within the broader context of the discipline’s epistemology and literacy conventions. In other words, a weak performance in the output, that is, writing, cannot just be treated by remedying language issues; as will be argued in later chapters, academic literacy support needs to include reading, evaluating sources, and ways of presenting and debating knowledge in the relevant discipline. It is of particular concern that the remedial support offered to students largely neglects academic reading, although this aspect of academic literacy is equally important as, and fundamental to, academic writing. Academic reading is different from all other types of reading and therefore needs to be taught to students (Sengupta, 2002). While reading for leisure typically requires only a receptive approach to the information from the text, academic reading requires a purposeful approach and active engagement with texts. Information cannot just be received, but must be questioned, compared with information from other sources, used in new conceptual contexts and transformed into different types of presentation (e.g. writing). Most students new to university also struggle with the extensive reading required at university, which involves multiple and lengthy texts with an unfamiliar style and terminology. Although the need to help students to develop adequate reading strategies and processes has been recognised in a number of publications (e.g. Abbott, 2013; Jolliffe & Harl, 2008; MacMillan, 2014), reading remains largely invisible in higher education pedagogy (see the discussion in van Pletzen, 2006).

The aim of this book is to promote a clearer understanding of the concept of academic literacy, and to show that this understanding necessitates approaches to literacy instruction that are fundamentally different from those currently in place. Such approaches need to recognise student diversity as well as the discipline-specific nature of academic literacy. The book has the following purposes:

(1)   To address common misunderstandings regarding students’ academic literacy needs, most notably the perception that it is writing only that constitutes the problem, that it is mainly language proficiency that causes deficiencies in writing, and that this problem only affects certain student groups.

(2)   To examine existing models of literacy/writing pedagogy and consider their suitability for the literacy development of diverse student populations.

(3)   To propose a model of inclusive academic literacy instruction and present an intervention study in which aspects of this model were applied.

Before focusing on the ‘problem’ that I see in the academic literacy support currently available in higher education, I must lay the ground by providing some background information on student diversity and by explaining the concept of academic literacy.

Student Diversity

Two main developments have led to the diversification of student populations in Anglophone and other higher education systems: that of widening participation and internationalisation.

Driven by government policy and a range of inclusion initiatives, there has been, over the past decades, a massive expansion in the number of students participating in higher education. In the UK, participation increased from a mere 5% of the age group of 18 to 25-year-olds in the 1960s to 43% by 2010, with the sharpest rise in numbers starting in the 1990s (Chowdry et al., 2010). A report on effective approaches to widening participation, commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and Office for Fair Access (OFFA), shows that that there have been similar substantial increases in student numbers in the USA, Australia and South Africa (HEFCE, 2013). Although this growth in numbers demonstrates the inclusion of previously underrepresented groups, inequalities persist in all four countries. In the UK, for instance, only 14% of pupils who are eligible for free school meals (i.e. coming from lower socio-economic groups) participate in higher education, and only 2% from this group gain access to a ‘top’ university. Recent research by HEFCE (2014) shows that ethnicity and disadvantage are significant factors influencing the chances of students in the UK to get a first or upper-second class degree.

In the USA, where there has been a substantial rise in participation by black and Hispanic students, only 18% of black people and 13% of Hispanic people held a BA in 2009, as compared to 29% of the white population. South Africa saw a massive increase in enrolments by African and coloured students between 2001 and 2010; however, the retention rate of both groups is low, and African students have the lowest graduation rate. The case study on South Africa, which is part of the report commissioned by HEFCE and OFFA, showed that of the 2004 student intake, by 2009 63.5% of the white student had graduated, as compared to only 38.3% of the African students and 42.1% of the coloured students (HEFCE, 2013). These figures suggest that student diversity, achieved through the inclusion of students from lower socio-economic and educational backgrounds, poses substantial challenges to higher education systems, and that adequate responses have not yet been found.

Internationalisation is, as Montgomery (2008: 19) states, a ‘socio-political force’ caused by increased student mobility and globalisation. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the number of students enrolled at universities outside their country of citizenship has increased from 0.8 million in 1975 to 4.3 million in 2011 (OECD, 2013). The greatest movement of foreign students has been into universities in English-speaking countries. The latest statistics on international student mobility released by the OECD (2013) show that 40% of the overall international student enrolment worldwide between 2000 and 2011 can be explained by increases of enrolments in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the UK and the US. In these countries, Australia has the highest percentage of international students with 19.8%, followed by the UK with 15.6% and New Zealand with 15.6% (OECD, 2013: 317). In the UK, for example, according to the statistics provided by the UK Council for International Student Affairs (UKCISA, 2014), in the academic year 2012–13, 49% of all full-time research postgraduate and 71% of all full-time taught postgraduate students were from international backgrounds. In some fields of study, for instance the Social Sciences, Business and Law, international student numbers are particularly high. Many students coming to study in Anglophone countries are non-native speakers of English from the outer or expanding Kachruvian circles (Kachru, 1985)¹ who aim to obtain – at great expense – a degree in the ‘inner circle of the Anglo-American sphere’ (Horner & Lu, 2012: 59). Gaining a degree from within that ‘powerful inner sphere’ (Horner & Lu, 2012: 59) is prestigious and helpful in terms of career prospects. Several countries with developing economies, for instance Brazil and China, are currently investing heavily in sending students to universities in Anglophone countries to produce a workforce that can function through English. According to the OECD, 53% of international students come from Asia (2013: 313). As universities depend increasingly on the income from international students, who pay higher study fees than domestic students, they have developed sophisticated marketing and recruitment strategies. More recently, there have been a growing number of universities in non-English- speaking countries which offer English-medium study programmes, particularly in Europe and Asia. This trend, according to the OECD (2013), is likely to continue and shows that more countries are trying to take their share of the lucrative international student market.

This level of student mobility has led to a substantial rise in the diversity of student populations. Whilst the coming together of people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds is certainly beneficial as it enhances students’ intercultural competence (e.g. Byram, 1997; Deardorff, 2006), serious concerns have been raised about the disadvantages experienced by international students. Some concerns relate to social adjustment and welfare, including issues such as racism, alienation and marginalisation affecting international students (Brown & Jones, 2013; Guo & Chase, 2011). Most publications, however, focus on international students’ academic progress, which may be hindered by difficulties with Western learning styles and the cultural predispositions of some groups of international students, most notably those from Confucian-heritage backgrounds (e.g. Kim, 2011; Wu & Rubin, 2000). Recent research examined these international students’ performance and attainment (e.g. Iannelli & Huang, 2013; Li et al., 2010; Morrison et al., 2005). Whilst Morrison et al. refer to some studies from the 1980s and 1990s that showed that international students in Australia performed better than so-called ‘home’ students, later research revealed that international students as a whole, and particularly Chinese students at the undergraduate level (Iannelli & Huang, 2013), persistently achieve lower attainment levels than other groups. A major determinant for lower performance for these students is English language proficiency (e.g. Li et al., 2010), and this finding has been confirmed as being a problem for international students in many studies (e.g. Berman & Cheng, 2001; Holmes, 2006). Despite the fact that universities have been making major support efforts through language classes specifically targeted at international students (typically English for Academic Purposes pre-sessional and in-sessional courses, see Chapter 3 for a detailed discussion), the research evidence shows that a lack of English language competence continues to disadvantage international students.

As will be discussed in Chapter 3, a number of scholars have criticised Anglophone universities for the imposition of language conventions on students from other cultures and for the failure to embrace linguistic diversity. However, as I shall argue, relaxing linguistic standards and conventions would not address important student needs which lie at the level of academic literacy.

Academic Literacy

The term ‘academic literacy’ is widely used with reference to the teaching of academic reading and writing (e.g. Belcher, 1994; Spack, 1997; Gibbons, 2009), with study skills or English for academic purposes (EAP) courses often being described as ‘academic literacy support’ (see for instance Ivanič & Lea, 2006: 9). This use represents a narrow view of literacy, particularly as these courses tend to be limited to a focus on grammatical accuracy and rhetorical appropriateness in academic writing. By contrast, in this book academic literacy is understood as the ability to communicate competently in an academic discourse community. This concept is underpinned by Hymes’ (1972) notion of communicative competence, situated learning theory, i.e. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) community-of-practice (CoP) model, genre theories which explain language use by their social context (e.g. Miller, 1994; Halliday, 1978) and language socialisation theory (Ochs, 1986). Conceptualising academic literacy as communicative competence emphasises the way in which its social dimensions require more than just linguistic knowledge. According to Allen and Brown (1976: 248),

communication competence, unlike linguistic competence, involves awareness of the transactions that occur between people. Competence in this perspective is tied to actual performance of the language in social situations.

Hymes defined communicative competence as ‘the capabilities of a person’ (1972: 282) consisting of language knowledge and the ability to use language appropriately in a specific context. Both language knowledge and the ability to use language relate to four parameters of communicative competence, which are formal possibility, feasibility, appropriateness, and probability of an utterance or language behaviour (Hymes, 1972: 281). From the perspective of social practice and genre theories which regard communicative function and linguistic form as integrally related (Halliday, 1975; Hymes, 1972, 1977), this means that an individual can understand and use the appropriate communicative functions of language for particular social situations and activities (Gee, 1990).

In academic contexts, the social situations and core activities are mainly concerned with knowledge construction, presentation and debate, and accomplished through genres (such as the lecture, the research proposal or the essay). These genres are in turn achieved through contextually appropriate language functions (such as reporting, reasoning, proposing, hedging). Thus, the capabilities of an academically literate, or communicatively competent, person involve, in addition to linguistic proficiency, (1) an understanding of the discipline’s² epistemology, i.e. the ways in which subject knowledge is created and communicated, (2) an understanding of the socio-cultural context, i.e. the status of the participants in the academic community and the purpose of the interactions occurring in the community, and (3) a command of the conventions and norms that regulate these interactions. As these interactions are manifested in genres, communicative competence in an academic discourse community can be understood as the ability to understand these genres and express oneself through them.

The development of academic literacy can be explained by language socialisation theory. Language socialisation refers to the process in which novices learn the language of a specific community, and become competent members of that community through the use of the language (Ochs, 1986). As Duff (2007: 311) explains, in this process ‘experts or more proficient members of a group play a very important role in socializing novices and implicitly or explicitly teaching them to think, feel, and act in accordance with the values, ideologies, and traditions of the group’. Novices, on the other hand, ‘teach’ the more expert members of the community what their communicative needs are, making the process ‘bidirectional’ (Duff, 2007: 311). Language socialisation theory draws on both sociocultural theory and the community-of-practice (CoP) model. A shared understanding among the three theories is that human interaction is fundamental to learning, and that the learning of novices is supported by more competent persons (Lantolf & Thorne, 2007; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Sociocultural theory contributes to language socialisation theory the concept that learning involves semiotic tools and artefacts that are typical for a specific community, while the CoP model contributes a focus on the legitimate peripheral participation of novices in the community that gradually leads to expert membership (Duff, 2007).

Summing up this argument, to gain communicative competence in their academic contexts, students need to learn more than subject knowledge. They need to develop the levels of epistemological and sociocultural knowledge that were outlined above. The development of this necessary knowledge requires interaction and negotiation between expert and novice members of the discourse community, and occurs through ‘exchanges of language in particular social situations’, because ‘the process of becoming a competent member of society is realised to a large extent through language, by acquiring knowledge of its functions, social distributions, and interpretations in and across socially defined situations’ (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1994: 470). In more concrete terms, it is the task of the subject lecturers as experts in the community to raise students’ awareness of epistemological and sociocultural issues. The ‘particular social situations’ for raising this awareness would be the same as those in which subject knowledge is taught and learned, i.e. lectures, seminars and tutorials. This is because subject knowledge is shaped by the epistemological and sociocultural context of the community, and expressed through genres. Thus the development of academic literacy, i.e. communicative competence, cannot be separated from the teaching of the subject. This understanding, as shall be seen, is fundamental to the argument I develop in this book.

Lastly, it should be noted that the terms ‘academic discourse community’ and ‘discipline’, which I use interchangeably in this book to describe the context in which students are studying, are both problematic. Hyland (2008a) points out the problem that ‘community’ might apply to disciplines, specialisms and domains, and simply defines a discourse community as ‘a group who have texts and practices in common’ (Hyland, 2008a: 549). Both terms have been criticised for suggesting homogeneous and static entities when in fact communities of practice are open and dynamic (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In particular, the notion of discipline has been described as ‘nebulous’ (Hyland, 2011: 178), as boundaries are not stable, and many study programmes are interdisciplinary. Swales (1990) proposed six characteristics of a discourse community of which three apply particularly well to ‘discipline’, namely that (1) it has ‘a broadly agreed set of common public goals’, (2) it utilises and possesses one or more genres for their communicative aims, and (3) it has ‘acquired some specific lexis’ (Swales, 1990: 24–27). The problem with the use of the term ‘discipline’ lies in the fact that this is too large a context for the literacy needs of most students. The programme in which a student is studying usually represents only a small subsection of the discipline. For students in undergraduate programmes, for instance, some genres of the discipline (such as the research article or the grant proposal) will be irrelevant. However, the discipline’s overall ‘agreed set of common public goals’, its ways of communicating knowledge, as well as some of the ‘specific lexis’, are relevant in every sub-discipline and in every study programme of that discipline. I therefore will refer to discipline as the academic discourse community, bearing in mind that for instructional purposes, the concept will have to be defined more narrowly. For instance, the initial academic discourse community for undergraduate students will be the people teaching, assessing and learning in the specific study programme, and communication will be restricted to a small subset of the discipline’s genres, such as textbooks and essays for ‘knowledge-telling’ (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987), i.e. presenting what they have learned. However, even at this stage, successful communication requires an understanding of the epistemology of the discipline.

I will now turn to the question of how universities deal with student diversity and academic literacy, or more precisely, the extent to which they ensure that students from all backgrounds gain the communicative competence to be successful in their study programmes. This is where the problem lies.

The Problem

The problem is the persistent failure by universities to support students adequately in their development of academic literacy, particularly at the initial stages of their study. While it can be argued that most students will eventually, through a lengthy process of tacit socialisation, manage to negotiate the required literacy conventions, the absence of sufficient provision of explicit information holds many back and is particularly detrimental to student groups who have additional disadvantages through their linguistic and educational backgrounds. In the absence of a holistic literacy instruction that includes epistemological and sociocultural knowledge, many students will not understand the meaning of the literacy conventions required of them. One example is a widespread perception by students who have not learned the epistemological rationale for academic attributions that referencing is just a technique to avoid plagiarism (e.g. Abasi & Graves, 2008).

As stated earlier, acquiring communicative competence requires interaction between experts and novices in the relevant social situations. This means that literacy instruction would need to be situated in the academic discourse community, and that the experts in the community would enable novices’ gradually increasing participation, as implied by the CoP and language socialisation theory. Despite this need, instruction and support at universities is predominantly offered in special units outside the disciplines. Within the disciplines, as Turner (2011: 15) points out, language ‘is taken for granted rather than recognised for its importance’. The way in which language is used in academic discourse is rarely made explicit to students. The experts in the discourse community, i.e. subject lecturers, usually feel only responsible for teaching subject content, and even if they are explicitly aware of the language use and literacy conventions of their discipline, may be unwilling to teach these. It seems to be generally assumed that students will gradually and implicitly understand what is required. When they do not, and their difficulties become apparent through weak performance in academic writing, the problem is typically diagnosed at the linguistic level and remedied through English language or skills classes offered to students from all disciplines. In these classes, some form of generic academic English is taught, with a strong focus on surface language features, and without much consideration of discipline-specific discourses. Consequently, all students are faced with the lengthy process of finding out what the discipline-specific literacy requirements of their study programmes are. Their academic writing, however, is assessed right from the beginning of their study, and, in the absence of explicit and appropriate instruction, some students are doomed to either low achievement or early failure. Although some subject lecturers might be providing support with academic literacy, this is not available to all or on a regular and systematic basis. Thus, the current instructional provision at universities, which is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, leads to two types of exclusion: the first is that the majority of students do not receive literacy instruction at all, and the second is that those who do receive instruction remain excluded from the genres and discourses of their academic disciplines. There are two main misconceptions that underlie the current remedial approach to literacy instruction.

The first misconception is that of academic literacy being equal to linguistic competence. This perception is