Course Overview

The course provides an introduction to the study of language and literacy in a range of academic settings, via the emerging area of ‘academic literacies’ in the New Literacy Studies field. Rather than a generic academic skill, academic literacy is studied as diverse, shaped by disciplines and subject areas. The course engages with two methodologies that shed light on academic texts and practices. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) focuses on texts, while ethnographic observation (including multimodal analysis) looks more closely at practices. These methodologies are used to explore the relationship between texts and their social-political-historical contexts. The course interrogates the politics of ‘academic voice’ to help us think about access questions in tertiary education settings locally and globally. 

Course entry requirements

Acceptance for the MEd 

Session Details 

The Academic Literacy course runs in the second semester in 2025 (12-14 weeks) every Thursday from 16h00 - 18h00 in face to face mode. There is a total of 3 assignments.

Convenor

Associate Professor Abongwe Bangeni
Associate Professor Bongi Bangeni (abongwe.bangeni@uct.ac.za)