Chapter 3 Shaping influence of discourses
3.8 Orientations to the teaching of literacy
3.8.1 The academic skills model
In the study skills model, writing is considered as the application of a set of linguistic skills. The extreme position in this approach assumes that writing is a unitary, context free activity in which the same technical skills and rules are transferable to all
writing (Ivanic, 2004; Lea and Street 2000). These skills include, among others, grammar usage, punctuation and spelling. Discourse competency in using these skills is expressed in terms of Discourses such as ‗correct‘, ‗accurate‘, ‗proper‘
(Ivanic, 2004). Moreover, competence is also measured textually, by looking at fluency in oral and written texts. Essentially, this approach to writing is prescriptive in nature, given successful learners are perceived as those who should or are able to write with accuracy in such linguistic skills. Geisler (1994 p. 35) comments that
―reading and writing practices, which on the surface look open and easily available to all, may actually have become arcane practices restricted to just a few‖. As a consequence, some students are often marginalised. Prinsloo (2000) explains that the adoption of skills based approaches is often accompanied by a ‗concern‘ with low levels of literacy to highlight a ‗literacy‘ crisis. In terms of South Africa, he observes that the ―concern is expressed in a more elementary form, as that which is either present or absent‖ (Prinsloo, 2000 p. 110). Hence, in South Africa, the concern is expressed as a ‗deficit‘ (Bengesai, 2010).
Whilst the teaching of skills is not useless in itself, this understanding is questionable in respect to other aspects of literacy as the discussion in ensuing sections will reveal. Lea and Street (2000) also argue that addressing literacy takes on particularly different meanings when considered entirely as study skills. This is because a skills based approach to literacy reflects the understanding that academic skills can be easily learnt and transferred to other literacy contexts since they would consist of aspects like spelling and grammar. As such, the study skills approach justifies the teaching of generic essay writing to all students, irrespective of the communicative and discursive practices of their disciplines. In the context of this study, such a view is seen as reductionist in nature given the fact that it reduces a complex phenomenon like literacy to a set of atomised skills (Picard, 2006; Lea and Street, 2000).
Research focused within this framework is concerned with measuring linguistic skills and is a common feature in corpus linguistics and most studies on ESL. As far as pedagogic practice is concerned, the focus is on attempts to ‗fix‘ students‘ academic
‗problems‘, which must be treated early; therefore, these problems are also treated
as a kind of pathology (Lea and Street, 2000). Or as Rose (1985 p. 453) puts it, such courses are an attempt to cure students who suffer from ‗diseased writing‘.
Accordingly, a teaching pedagogy framed within the skills method sees the inability to use these skills as a ‗problem‘, a ‗disease‘, or a ‗deficit‘. In light of this discussion, the skills approach can critiqued at the levels of ideology and epistemology.
Ideologically, the skills approach reflects an autonomous view of literacy which sees literacy as a set of context-free skills which are also universal both in time and space such that they can be easily transferred to different contexts (Street, 2005; 2003;
1984; Ivanic 2004; Lea and Street, 2000). As the discussion in subsequent sections in this chapter will show, academic literacy has come to be seen as a social practice emerging from contextual expectations (Lea and Street, 2000; Kern, 2000). Thus, literacy practices are acquired in specific socio-cultural contexts rather than universal ones. Epistemologically, the skills approach has been critiqued as being reductionist and distorted in the sense that the ability to construct syntactically accurate sentences does not necessarily result in appropriately written texts. This is because the academic skills such as sentence structure, grammar or spellings merely constitute the surface features of academic writing (Johns, 2005; Hyland, 2002a).
Simply put, grounding students in grammar and other technical skills of writing does little to develop their secondary Discourse, academic literacy, which also involves non-language features such as voice, identity and other genre-based features (Bengesai, 2010).
The second tier suggested by Ivanic is the creativity approach which is also referred to as the expressivist method (see Johns, 2005). It is so called because the methodology is concerned with the style, content and the way in which student writing entertains the reader, rather than with the linguistic form as is the case with the study skills approach (Ivanic, 2004). The major concern is not on how the student produces the writing (that is, the process), but on the final product of the author‘s creativity (Ferris and Hedgcock, 2005; Hyland, 2002a). As such, the creativity approach is considered as a product approach. In this approach, writing is seen as a valuable activity in its own right; people learn to write by writing and reading. The method has got its roots in literacy studies and is expressed in terms of discourses such as ‗good vocabulary‘ and/or ‗interesting content‘ (Ivanic, 2004). Thus, it is closely related to the literacy as a state of grace metaphor, given ‗good vocabulary‘
is a seen as a good virtue for a writer. Pedagogically, author creativity is privileged and it is believed that nothing should interfere with this. To achieve this creativity, students are encouraged to engage with and write on topics that are of interest to them (Ferris and Hedgcock, 2005). For this reason the notion of voice – the author‘s identity, stance and ownership of text – is privileged (Bengesai, 2010). The major limitation of this approach is that it encourages students to write texts that are of no use both in their acquisition of disciplinary Discourses as well as in the real world. As such it does little to introduce students to the literacy practices expected by the disciplinary community to which they are seeking membership (McKenna, 2010 p. 8).
This is because students learn to write for an imagined audience. In spite of these weaknesses, the expressivist/creative approach has influenced literacy pedagogy which explores the notion of voice, which in the context of this study is considered a developmental priority in academic literacy development. This is explored further in section 3.8.4.
The third tier suggested by Ivanic is called the process approach. Curry and Lillis (2003) note that this approach emerged from the expressivist method of teaching academic writing. The discourse differs from the two approaches discussed above in that it focuses attention on the process of writing rather than the end product (the finished text).This approach has its roots in the cognitive psychology of the late 1970s (Ivanic, 2004) and was advanced by the seminal work of Emig (1971). Emig perceived writing as a recursive and uninterrupted process which involved cognitive and practical processes (Voss, 1983). The cognitive processes involve pre-writing activities such as brainstorming, which are essential in formulating ideas for writing while the practical processes involve during an post writing activities such as planning, drafting, revising and editing. The practical processes are the ones which lead to the completion of the written product (Ivanic, 2004). Cast in this way, the focus of the process approach to writing is to improve the quality of the end product.
Because these processes are logical and sequential, mastery can be tested empirically (ibid). Consequently, critics have suggested that this approach has been attractive to teachers, transformed literacy teaching and has also generated a lot of research (see Johns, 2005; Curry and Lillis, 2003).
In a critique of the process approach, Bartholomae (1985 p. 142) points out that it is the product and not the plan of writing that locates the writer in his or her text- that is, as an insider to the discourse to which he is seeking the right to be heard. Another limitation with this approach is that it fails to recognise writing as a social activity.
Rather, it frames the writer as a solitary individual engaged in a process of discovering and communicating personal meaning only (Curry and Lillis, 2003;
Hyland, 2002a). Yet, in the context of academic literacy, writing is about gaining membership to a CoP. A further limitation relates to the focus on the mastery of the processes of writing. By so doing, the approach fails to differentiate between different types of writing in the different disciplines. Just like the study skills, the processes are also considered generic and can be used with any form of writing.
Developments in the field of academic writing have problematised literacy approaches as the ones discussed in this section by highlighting that there are significant differences in writing in different disciplines (Bengesai, 2010). These developments are discussed in the sections to follow.