Negotiating Academic Literacies: Teaching and Learning Across Languages and Cultures is a cross-over volume in the literature between first and second language/literacy. This anthology of articles brings together different voices from a range of publications and fields and unites them in pursuit of an understanding of how academic ways of knowing are acquired. The editors preface the collection of readings with a conceptual framework that reconsiders the current debate about the nature of academic literacies. In this volume, the term academic literacies denotes multiple approaches to knowledge, including reading and writing critically. College classrooms have become sites where a number of languages and cultures intersect. This is the case not only for students who are in the process of acquiring English, but for all learners who find themselves in an academic situation that exposes them to a new set of expectations. This book is a contribution to the effort to discover ways of supporting learning across languages and cultures--and to transform views about what it means to teach and learn, to read and write, and to think and know. Unique to this volume is the inclusion of the perspectives of writers as well as those of teachers and researchers. Furthermore, the contributors reveal their own struggles and accomplishments as they themselves have attempted to negotiate academic literacies. The chronological ordering of articles provides a historical perspective, demonstrating ways in which issues related to teaching and learning across cultures have been addressed over time. The readings have consistency in terms of quality, depth, and passion; they raise important philosophical questions even as they consider practical classroom applications. The editors provide a series of questions that enable the reader to engage in a generative and exciting process of reflection and inquiry. This book is both a reference for teachers who work or plan to work with diverse learners, and a text for graduate-level courses, primarily in bilingual and ESL studies, composition studies, English education, and literacy studies.

South African universities face major challenges in meeting the needs of their students in the area of academic language and literacy. The dominant medium of instruction in the universities is English and, to a much lesser extent, Afrikaans, but only a minority of the national population are native speakers of these languages. Nine other languages can be media of instruction in schools, which makes the transition to tertiary education difficult enough in itself for students from these schools. The focus of this book is on procedures for assessing the academic language and literacy levels and needs of students, not in order to exclude students from higher education but rather to identify those who would benefit from further development of their ability in order to undertake their degree studies successfully. The volume also aims to bring the innovative solutions designed by South African educators to a wider international audience.

While access to higher education has increased globally, student retention has become a major challenge. This book analyses various aspects of the learning pathways of black students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds at a relatively elite, English-medium, historically white South African university. The students are part of a generation of young black people who have grown up in the new South Africa and are gaining access to higher education in unprecedented numbers. Based on two longitudinal case studies, Negotiating Learning and Identity in Higher Education makes a contribution to the debates about how to facilitate access and graduation of working-class students. The longitudinal perspective enabled the students participating in the research to reflect on their transition to university and the stumbling blocks they encountered in their senior years. The contributors show that the school-to-university transition is not linear or universal. Students had to negotiate multiple transitions at various times and both resist and absorb institutional, disciplinary and home discourses. The book describes and analyses the students' ambivalence as they straddle often conflicting discourses within their disciplines; within the institution; between home and the institution, and as they occupy multiple subject positions that are related to the boundaries of place and time. Each chapter also describes the ways in which the institution supports and/or hinders students' progress, explores the implications of its findings for models of support and addresses the issue of what constitutes meaningful access to institutional and disciplinary discourses.

Shifting the discourse from a focus on academic language to the more dynamic but less researched construct of academic literacies, this volume addresses three key questions: • What constitutes academic literacy? • What does academic literacy development in adolescent multilingual students look like and how can this development be assessed? • What classroom contexts foster the development of academic literacies in multilingual adolescents? The contributing authors provide divergent definitions of academic literacies and use dissimilar theoretical and methodological approaches to study literacy development. Nevertheless, all chapters reflect a shared conceptual framework for examining academic literacies as situated, overlapping, meaning-making practices. This framework foregrounds students’ participation in valued disciplinary literacy practices. Emphasized in the new college and career readiness standards, the notion of disciplinary practices allows the contributing authors to bridge the language/content dichotomy, and take a more holistic as well as nuanced view of the demands that multilingual students face in general education classrooms. The volume also explores the implications of the emphasis on academic literacy practices for classroom instruction, research, and policy.

The editors and contributors to this collection explore what it means to adopt an “academic literacies” approach in policy and pedagogy. Transformative practice is illustrated through case studies and critical commentaries from teacher-researchers working in a range of higher education contexts—from undergraduate to postgraduate levels, across disciplines, and spanning geopolitical regions including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cataluña, Finland, France, Ireland, Portugal, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Teaching Academic Literacy provides a unique outlook on a first-year writing program's evolution by bringing together a group of related essays that analyze, from various angles, how theoretical concepts about writing actually operate in real students' writing. Based on the beginning writing program developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a course that asks students to consider what it means to be a literate member of a community, the essays in the collection explore how students become (and what impedes their progress in becoming) authorities in writing situations. Key features of this volume include: * demonstrations of how research into specific teaching problems (e.g., the problem of authority in beginning writers' work) can be conducted by examining student work through a variety of lenses such as task interpretation, collaboration, and conference, so that instructors can understand what factors influence students, and can then use what they have learned to reshape their teaching practices; * adaptability of theory and research to develop a course that engages basic writers with challenging ideas; * a model of how a large writing program can be administered, particularly in regards to the integration of research and curriculum development; and * integration of literary and composition theories.

Inclusivity is a crucial factor in assessment design as fair assessment must reflect the needs of a diverse student body. Assessment practices should also be culturally inclusive and supportive to all students while considering the needs of learners with disabilities and specific learning difficulties. Educational institutions worldwide are adopting a range of principles, using a variety of assessment methods, and developing assessment literacy. All these issues must be considered when researching inclusive assessment practices and policies. The Handbook of Research on Policies and Practices for Assessing Inclusive Teaching and Learning discusses the needs of learners of any context, background, and culture. This book strives to promote the importance of global inclusive assessment and teaching, giving an understanding to educators and faculty of the negative effect uniform assessment and teaching strategies have on a diverse body of students. Covering topics such as equitable design, ethnic preferential policies, and multilingual perspectives, this book provides an indispensable resource for researchers, practitioners, educators, teacher educators, policymakers, administrators, program planners, educational managers, educational leaders, professors, and academicians.

This book reports on a two-year long, qualitative literacy case study of the academic literacies of first and second-generation immigrant youth in an afterschool tutoring program in South Bronx, New York. Through transcripts of tutoring sessions, interview data, and youths’ written work, each chapter highlights how youth interpreted and navigated various school assignments, and what resources and perspectives they brought to unpacking the meaning and significance of texts and disciplinary discourses. By focusing on the immigrant youth themselves, and not on the teaching that happens (or does not happen) inside classrooms, this volume provides a unique and much-needed vantage point to understanding the academic literacies and engagement of urban immigrant youth.

Provides insights into the process of knowledge construction in EFL/ESL writing - from classrooms to research sites, from the dilemmas and risks NNEST student writers experience in the pursuit of true agency to the confusions and conflicts academics experience in their own writing practices.