Chapter 6 Empirical Experiences of academic literacy
6.5 Interview data
6.5.2 Tutors‘ perceptions of students
I also made an assumption earlier that teachers‘ perceptions of literacy influence their perceptions of students. In this section, I describe tutors‘ perceptions of students. The major finding related to this broad theme is that tutors acknowledged the existence of unsuccessful writing by students. Unsuccessful writing was mainly described in terms of ‗standard of English‘ and related concepts like grammar, sentence construction and technical aspects like formatting, and referencing. These are some of their responses:
Tutor 3: Well, their standard of English is abysmal in most cases and I often ask, start off by asking students what their grades where for English and they are very corky, they all got As, they were wonderful but when it comes to writing, even simple sentence construction, use of ah passive voice ah, I can‘t remember the things, you know the actual language, the actual grammar, it‟s not very good.
Tutor 7: Uhuh, well, 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 um, sort of satisfactory, ....so in terms of their writing skills they weren‘t poor but they were very informal, they were very first-person style, often incorporated a lot of slang, colloquialisms, sms talk that kind of thing so. And they often didn‟t follow instructions, so if you asked them to put certain information in certain sections they just totally disregarded that completely.
Tutor 9: oh, gosh um , I‟m not too sure if they have had experience with technical writing. So, a lot of them are trying to be creative in a sort of English form like they used to do in an argumentative essay or even creatively when they are writing, trying to express whatever thoughts they have and.. They can‟t do that. And they seem to make that mistake of putting their sort of expressive language through where it‘s supposed to be technical, so, that‘s interesting and some of them even at the end of the course battle realising that they should be objective and they can‘t do that or they find difficulty doing that.
Tutor 10: We teach first year students so they are just out of school and very inexperienced when it comes to academic scientific writing. They have to learn many things including organising and referencing in detail.
These responses suggest that tutors did not perceive students‘ writing to be in conformity with university norms of acceptable writing. In the second comment, Tutor 7 makes reference to UNITE students and presents them as fundamentally different from the other engineering students in terms of their ability. The UNITE programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal was developed to provide access to students from historically disadvantaged schools in South Africa. These students are deemed to be fundamentally underprepared for learning. This comes out saliently in the comment from Tutor 2. The above comments also reveal the belief that technical report writing is a ‗problem‘ that is predominantly textual and directly related to English language proficiency. However, tutors also indicated other reasons that they felt were causal
factors for the ‗unsuccessful‘ writing by students. Some of the comments are listed below:
Tutor 3: ...Some of them resist and persist in making the same mistake over and over again. Referencing for example, is a, is, it‟s not difficult to grasp because I give them examples of how you reference, citation and things like that and even though they read the examples and I go over and over and over, they still come up with...
Tutor 5: Well, like I said, they are not familiar with it, they haven‘t read a lot of this style of writing.... and you know what, the social media, social networking, texting, all of that it does impact on the style of writing.
While Tutor 5 was quick to cite other semiotic domains such as social networking that influence student writing, explanations for students‘ ‗resistance‘ and
‗persistence‘ in making the same mistake (Tutor, 3) were provided through the discourses of ‗discipline and responsibility‘. Tutor 7 reiterated the sentiments expressed by Tutor 3 and felt that students “often didn‟t follow instructions, so if you asked them to put certain information in certain sections they just totally disregarded that completely”. She further attributed these actions to what she termed a lack of
„work ethic‟, suggesting that students have a moral obligation to behave in a certain way that is acceptable in the academy, while Tutor 3 felt it was a ―matter of discipline” which was “lacking in the whole country”. The major problem with such a perception is that it fails to take into account other factors that might influence students to behave in the way they do. For instance, it is possible that what was perceived by the tutor as a simple case of students not following instructions could as well be a case of students not understanding these instructions.
While the above excerpts assign agency in learning to the students, highlighting issues of self-discipline and resistance, tutor 8 was more critical on this point and reminded me that it was unfair to talk of engineering students as technical writers, a status which denotes expertise. This is what he had to say:
Tutor 8: I don‘t think it‘s a fair question. I think that the idea that you can rate someone as a technical writer when they have no conception of what technical writing is, turns out the exact same problem turns out in humanities when people are like, “how do you get them to think critically, how do you get them to do a critical analysis” …
In the next subsection, I describe students‘ perception of technical writing and themselves as revealed in the interview transcripts.