Ilse Fouche

University of the Witwatersrand | wits · Division of Languages, Literacies and Literatures

Humanising pedagogy has been a focus of recent research as more universities move to online and blended models of instruction. Online learning has been linked to feelings of isolation, disconnection, and depersonalisation of the learning experience for many students. In South Africa, the shift to online instruction took place in the context of the...

The concept of agency features with increasing prominence in academic discourse, particularly within the field of literacy education. This concept is highly relevant to research which focuses on students who are beginning their postgraduate journey and who need to make a shift from being undergraduates to becoming independent postgraduate students....

This article, located in the discipline of academic literacy studies, draws upon the fields of critical realism, design research, and evaluation studies. It reports on the validation of a flexible evaluation design for assessing the impact of academic literacy interventions. The design was validated in two ways. Firstly, through a process of critic...

The advent of Covid-19 forced universities worldwide to find ways of presenting content online that would otherwise have been facilitated in a face-to-face environment. A first-year literacy course at a South African university servicing a large number of B.Ed. students had traditionally relied on class discussions and small group work for clarific...

South African lecturers and students often struggle to reconcile the demands of an increasingly globalised world with pedagogies that can be adapted to harness students' local contexts, and which can be used to draw on students' lived experiences in the African context. This paper explores how a first-year academic literacies course could be reconc...

In 2020, when the switch to remote teaching and learning required redesigning asynchronous on-line versions of face-to-face courses, we were concerned about whether access to engaged and dialogic learning could be facilitated in this new space. In attempting to address this concern we asked students in a B Ed Honours course to post, in an online fo...

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused many universities to move instruction online. For the most part, this move has not been based on sound principles and best practices of online teaching, but can instead be characterised as emergency remote teaching (ERT) that aims to continue instruction despite the substantial drawbacks of insufficient planning or...

Our paper discusses our recent experiences with designing effective assessments for challenging local contexts by using group work portfolio projects. South African universities are experiencing ever-increasing student numbers, diverse student bodies which have different language and literacy skill levels, and limited resources. Simultaneously, the...

The Covid-19 global pandemic has resulted in many countries moving teaching and learning online. South Africa is a country with major inequalities in terms of access to electricity, internet and information technologies, which have created considerable problems for online learning at institutions of higher learning in the country. In this paper, we...

In higher education institutions in South Africa, educators working in the fields of language and academic literacy need to be sensitive and responsive to the linguistic and cultural diversity of the student body, and traditional pedagogical approaches are often inappropriate to meet the needs of students and of the wider call to decolonise higher...

A lack of transfer of academic literacy competencies was identified by academic literacy and Statistics lecturers involved in an extended programme course. This paper reports on one attempt at a workable collaborative solution to this challenge. The collaborative attempt is situated within the academic literacies framework, and is described. Therea...

Academic literacy interventions are becoming increasingly important in a country where the secondary education system no longer adequately prepares students for the literacy demands of higher education. This article investigates whether there was an improvement in students’ academic literacy levels between the onset and completion of an academic li...

A lack of transfer of academic literacy competencies was identified by academic literacy and Statistics lecturers involved in an extended programme course. This paper reports on one attempt at a workable collaborative solution to this challenge. The collaborative attempt is situated within the academic literacies framework, and is described. Therea...

This article reports on a study which assessed the impact of an academic literacy course on students’ academic literacy levels. A combination of instruments suggested in an evaluation design by Fouché, Van Dyk and Butler (2016) was drawn on. Firstly, a pre-test/post-test design was used with three instruments, namely a valid and reliable academic l...

Considering the vast array of academic literacy interventions that are presented both nationally and internationally, and the resources required to present these interventions, it is becoming increasingly important for those who are responsible for these interventions to provide evidence of their impact. The aim of this paper is to provide an overv...

Responsibly designing academic literacy interventions is becoming increasingly important in a higher education environment where resources for student development are scarce. Providing proof of the effectiveness of such interventions is equally important – academic literacy specialists must show that what they are doing has a significant and meanin...

English for Specific Purposes courses are taught at many universities around the world and also play a critical role in the South African context. There is limited transparency and therefore little agreement regarding what the curricula of such courses should include. The aim of this study was to start a conversation about which academic abilities...

A variety of academic literacy interventions are used at higher education institutions to address the low level of academic literacy with which many students enter these institutions. Considering the increasingly resource-scarce higher education environment, it is becoming crucial for those who are responsible for such interventions to provide evid...

This paper describes a study which explored whether attending tutorials facilitated by senior students improves tertiary students’ marks in an academic literacy course. Data were drawn from the academic literacy test marks and essay assignment marks of students who took a year-long academic literacy course at the University of Pretoria. A statistic...

Over the past years, there has been a consistent call from Government and industry for South African tertiary institutions to deliver more graduates in the fields of science and technology. This, however, is no mean feat for universities, as the pool of prospective candidates delivers very few students with the necessary academic literacy abilities...

Distance education is generally seen as a very isolating experience for students, but one often forgets that it can be an equally isolating experience for teaching staff who oftentimes work in isolation from colleagues. This study examines the experiences of nine tutors at the Reading and Writing Centres of one of the 10 biggest universities in the...