Chapter 6 Empirical Experiences of academic literacy
6.7 The deficit discourse
only ESL students are outsiders to the technical communication discourse (Boughey, 2008). Drawing on Bourdieu‘s notion of cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977/1990), I am convinced that by linking success in higher education primarily to language proficiency, rather than to the acquisition of concealed practices and values, these discourses normalise the discipline-specific forms of knowledge construction, and give insufficient heed to the fact that access to these concealed practices and values is more readily available to certain socio-economic groups than to others. Bourdieu (in Hillier and Rooksby, 2005) also saw the scientific field as being hierarchically structured in the sense that it afforded exclusive rights of entry (p. 9) to certain groups only. By representing white students as the ones who are naturally inclined to pass with straight As, Lecturer 1 was in a way suggesting that these students had a legitimate place in the Engineering discipline as opposed to the non-English speaking students.
It is clear that talk about students‘ ‗experiences in the Technical communication for Engineers occurs in a context which stereotypes difference by focusing on black students only. This militates, however, against the goal of improving academic literacy practices of these students. This is because these stereotypes affect the confidence and motivation with which the students approach their work; hence they begin their education career already with a ‗deficit‘. Research has demonstrated that in contexts where issues of race, racism and stereotypes are triggered, students‘
performance is affected (Gee, 1999). This perhaps explains why the black–white divide has been rather static, with black students continuously failing to meet the requirements of higher education. Thus it would not be erroneous to conclude that stereotyping of difference gives an unfair advantage to students of other races, and hence that issues of power, social practice and identity are implicated in the context of the Technical Communication for Engineers course.
Curry (2002 p. 48) refers to the kind of representation that emerges from the utterance by Lecturer 1 as a cultural model and cautions that such models ―generally operate unconsciously- therefore identifying them is not a simple or transparent task‖. Citing Gee (1996), she adds that we must infer from the person‘s beliefs, actions and words what theoretical frame they are actually using. This corresponds with the realist notion of abduction where analysis involves the recontextualisation of
data within theoretical or conceptual frameworks (Danermark et al., 2002). This leads me to question why Lecturer 1 associates English first language students with greater academic ability, as if suggesting that ESL students cannot attain such higher grades. Is he implying that there are inherent racial limitations to acquiring academic literacy and, ultimately academic success? It should not be taken for granted that linguistic background is a barrier to learning – a position which assumes that ESL students‘ experiences of learning are homogeneous. Research within the socio-cultural tradition has shown that students‘ experiences differ even within the same cultural group. This makes it unethical for academics to make such sweeping assumptions about students without an understanding of these students as individuals. Drawing on the theoretical construct of participation adopted in this study, I am convinced that this way of representing students‘ profiles constructs English L1 learners as closer to full participation in the academy, while it constructs ESL learners as outsiders‘ to the discourse. I am further convinced that these comments perpetuate the notion that although the Technical Communication for Engineers course is useful, it is not necessary for all students and should rather be reserved for a certain group of students. These widely held beliefs about students‘
profiles are called in question by research based on literacy biographies or narratives (Leibowitz, 2004; Hutchings, 2002) which concluded that that academic literacy is a problem that cuts across educational or linguistic backgrounds suggesting that it is not native to anyone. So to assign agency to learn to the students is considered in this study to be a limiting factor in the development of discursive identity. Leibowitz states that ―to make statements about language and race could be essentialising, and extremely dangerous, or at least, let us say, simplistic‖ (personal communication, February 8, 2009).
The data also reflects the idea that the ‗problems‘ students experience with writing are perceived as merely textual, and hence explainable through the linguistic mode.
Let us re-consider the following excerpt from Tutor 7.
Tutor 7: My experience with the students is that I did not have any UNITE group, I had a Chem Eng and a Mech Eng group, and I found the students to be reasonably grammatically sort of satisfactory, that is they were able to put sentences together.
Tutor 7‘s description of students pivots on linguistic features such as being
―grammatically sort of satisfactory‖. This description is also used to mark the difference between UNITE students and the Chemical Engineering students. As indicated earlier in this chapter, UNITE is an access programme for students from
‗disadvantaged backgrounds‘. Considering the long-standing divides along racial lines of socio-cultural and educational realities in South Africa, with black people as underdogs, it stands to reason that UNITE students are predominantly black. They are also often described as ESL. Bearing in mind that the choice of description and association is considered an essential discursive practice in CDA, I am compelled to unpack this utterance. An essential question that needs to be asked is: Why did Tutor 7 refer to UNITE students if she was not teaching them? Surely, this was an uncalled for comparison? Furthermore, this was the first time that Tutor 7 was tutoring on the Technical Communication course, suggesting that she had never taught UNITE students. So what was the basis of her knowledge of students? The fact that she was able to generalise about UNITE students without having interacted with them illustrates the taken-for-granted assumptions about students that are common in higher education. I am convinced that this utterance was produced to highlight difference by privileging certain groups of students, while undermining others. I am further convinced that this comment by Tutor 7 can create an effect of distance between the tutor and the ‗other‘ students who were not ―reasonably grammatically sort of satisfactory‖; ―reasonably‖ as used by this tutor implies that acquiring a language is a transparent and easy process. Also implied is the idea that those who fail to attain ‗reasonable‘ levels are outsiders. A further signifier of this difference between Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and UNITE students as explained by Tutor 7 is the Matric point system. Research has long shown the poor reliability of matriculation scores, suggesting therefore that ―success in school English does not necessarily indicate proficiency in the language‖
(McKenna, 2004a p 152). The same tutor further states that ―most of the students I had were from good schools”. In so doing, she subscribes to the widely held perception that students from disadvantaged schools are a homogenous group whose educational ability can also be described homogeneously.
By highlighting the limitations in such an understanding of students as products purely of their home and school, I am not overlooking the fact that educational
background can influence academic success. I remain concerned, however, that such taken-for-granted perceptions ―are imbued with discourses of difference and deficit views‖ and that ―what is cultural about people‘s practices is presumed by virtue of their membership in a cultural community rather than by their history of involvement in everyday practices‖ (Gutierrez et al., 2009 p. 218). Such views consequently fail to recognise that as students interact between home, school and the larger community, they also acquire other discourses that might not necessarily be in deficit. For instance, students interact with other students from different schools; they also learn discourses through popular culture – listening to the radio, watching television, or reading newspapers. Much as English may not be their home language, this does not mean the students are tabula rasa. Suffice to say that acquiring discourses involves both linear transitions such as home to school, and lateral transitions where discourse acquisition occurs simultaneously – what Gee (1996) has termed borderland discourses. According to Boughey (2012a p. 144),
Social accounts of learning would argue, therefore, that what is often cited as a ‗second language problem‘ in higher education is actually a matter of students making choices for language use based on contexts other than the academic contexts in which they find themselves
This makes it difficult to speak of students‘ discourses as solely the product of their home and school, but it does call upon scholarship to address the holistic nature of discourse acquisition.