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%...