Browsing by Author "Millin, Tracey Jane"

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    Reading to learn : a literature review within a South African context
    (Stellenbosch University, Department of Linguistics, 2015) Millin, Tracey Jane
    Academic literacy development within the secondary schooling system in South Africa has reached crisis proportions, with a large number of students exiting the system unable to function adequately within the tertiary sector or labour market. Attempts to remedy this crisis by introducing curriculum reform over the past few years have yielded little success, with universities having to take on the literacy problem by offering a variety of remedial programmes to ensure that students are equipped to access learning and succeed at their studies. Research shows that most literacy intervention programs at universities appear to favour a more traditional approach to English academic language development by focusing on grammatical rules, sentence structure, spelling and punctuation. This bottom-up approach does not necessarily equip students with the skills needed to write coherent and cohesive extended pieces of writing as required by university assessment processes. For this reason, the Reading to Learn (RtL) methodology was chosen to be implemented within a writing module at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and within selected Grade 11 classes in the Winelands District in an attempt to find an alternative approach to academic literacy development. The purpose of this article is to offer a comprehensive synthesis of some of the theoretical assumptions of RtL as well as its practical implementation before embarking on an evaluative study of this methodology in future papers. In doing so, this article offers a brief discussion on academic literacy pedagogies and situates RtL within these frameworks. This is followed by a synthesis of the practical implementation of RtL and a discussion of the works of Halliday (1989, 1996), Vygotsky (1978) and Bernstein (1990, 1996) which have had an influence on the development of RtL.
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    Scaffolding academic literacy using the reading to learn intervention : an evaluative study of a tertiary education context in South Africa
    (Stellenbosch University, 2014) Millin, Tracey Jane; Millin, Mark Wayland
    This article reports on the use of the Reading to Learn (RtL) intervention at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) to accelerate the development of academic literacy skills of ill-prepared students transitioning from school to university. This paper makes an original contribution to the literature on academic literacy development in three ways: firstly, this study pre-dates another published paper on the topic; secondly, it was the first study of RtL in a tertiary education context in South Africa and, thirdly, it applies a novel statistical method for data analysis purposes. The RtL pedagogy draws on the theoretical assumptions of Vygotsky, Halliday and Bernstein, and assists in the development of literacy (reading and writing) skills necessary to succeed at university. The context of education and poor literacy levels amongst primary, secondary and tertiary students in South Africa is briefly outlined, followed by a brief overview of RtL. The paper continues by adopting a small-scale quantitative approach to testing the efficacy of RtL. In addition to various descriptive statistics, the analysis of literacy scores, scores which were generated throughout an academic writing module at UKZN, is undertaken using a nonparametric testing procedure. A noteworthy finding of the study concerns the weakest cohort of students, in that, these students made the greatest improvements throughout the RtL intervention. Hence, RtL may be a useful mechanism to ‘democratise’ literacy classrooms by narrowing the abilities gap between students with weaker and stronger literacy skills in South Africa.
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    Scaffolding academic literacy using the reading to learn methodology: an evaluative study
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-03) Millin, Tracey Jane; Anthonissen, Christine; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The primary aim of this study was to test and assess the efficacy of an innovative literacy development intervention, Reading to Learn (RtL), with Grade 11 students at two schools within the Winelands District of the Western Cape. The RtL intervention, originally designed to address inequitable literacy development outcomes of students from marginalised communities in Australia, was undertaken against the backdrop of increasingly serious concerns regarding literacy development in primary and secondary education in South Africa. Recent research has confirmed that poor literacy performance at school cannot be divorced from social conditions and educational practices that may exclude some and privilege other learners. In this study, RtL was designed purposefully to scaffold the development of more advanced academic literacy skills, with special support being offered to students with the greater need, whilst still providing sufficient stimulation for better performing students. A characterising feature of RtL is its affordance of equal opportunities to students from outside mainstream Discourses, by providing explicit access to the Discourse of formal schooling. The theoretical conceptual framework of RtL is derived from the work of Halliday (language as a text in a social context), Vygotsky (learning as a social process) and Bernstein (education as a pedagogic device for maintaining inequality). The two central research questions considered (i) whether RtL could be effective in a smallscale South African secondary school context, and (ii) whether RtL outcomes in such a context would be comparable to other studies of RtL conducted elsewhere. Using a long-term action research design, this mixed methods inquiry into academic literacy development worked with students’ writing portfolios collected throughout the RtL intervention. A linguistic biographical questionnaire was used to gather student-specific data. Student work was assessed, codified and given numerical literacy scores which allowed for descriptive and more advanced statistical data analysis. A number of cases were closely analysed to illustrate the nature of the intervention and students’ levels of literacy pre and post intervention. Triangulation of the various kinds of data revealed how general data patterns emerging from the small-scale statistical analysis relate to contextual features specific to local social and educational conditions. The findings of this study showed that students’ academic literacy skills improved over the duration of the RtL intervention. The greatest area of improvement across all students (regardless of school context) was evidenced in more advanced schematic structuring of both the narrative and academic essay genres. From a cross-sectional (across schools) perspective, the greatest overall improvement in written literacy skills was among the weaker cohort of students from the peri-urban township school. The phenomenon of weaker students making greater overall gains was also evidenced from a time series (within school) perspective. This encouraging finding indicates a possible convergence (or ‘catch-up’) effect, for students previously categorised as academically weak, regardless of school context, meaning that the documented convergence effects also seemed to occur irrespective of students’ socioeconomic circumstances. Furthermore, the findings of this study, with regards to the efficacy of RtL, are comparable to findings from other studies conducted globally, those in Australian studies, in particular.