Academic Biliteracies

Multilingual Repertoires in Higher Education

David M. Palfreyman, Christa van der Walt

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783097401
• eBook ISBN: 9781783097432
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Adult Education
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Research on academic literacy within higher education has focused almost exclusively on the development of academic literacy in English. This book is unique in showing how students use other languages when they engage with written academic content – whether in reading, discussing or writing – and how increasingly multilingual higher education campuses open up the possibility for students to exploit their multilingual repertoires in and around reading/writing for academic purposes. Chapters range from cases of informal student use of different written languages, to pedagogical, institutional and disciplinary strategies leveraging multilingual resources to develop biliteracy. They are ordered according to two dominant themes. The first includes accounts of diverse multilingual contexts where biliteracy practices emerge in response to the demands of academic reading and writing. The second theme focuses on more deliberate attempts to teach biliteracy or to teach in a way that supports biliteracy. The collection will be of interest to researchers, higher education practitioners and students of multilingual higher education and academic literacy.

1Introduction: Biliteracies in Higher Education

David M. Palfreyman and Christa van der Walt

Literacy is a key element of higher education: learning and teaching in universities and colleges is supported and evidenced via a range of texts and genres from reference works to lecture handouts, essays, portfolios and research articles. As higher education becomes more widely available and more internationalized, it is increasingly common for this literacy to involve more than one language in some way. This book deals with biliteracy in academic contexts: that is (adapting a definition from Hornberger (1990)) the use in a higher education context of two or more languages in or around written text for the purpose of broadening or deepening knowledge. Our aim in this book is to bring together studies of academic biliteracy in diverse parts of the world and to consider how it may be an integral element of learning at the tertiary level. The chapters in this book range from cases of informal student use of different written languages, to pedagogical, institutional and disciplinary strategies leveraging multilingual resources to develop literacy.

Globalised Higher Education, Multilingual Campuses and Implications for Teaching and Learning

Much has been written in the past 20 years on the way in which globalising forces influence higher education both positively and negatively. Terms such as student mobility and internationalisation are used to describe challenges and opportunities at organisational, political and financial levels, with sporadic attention to the internationalisation of the curriculum and the desirability of educating for international citizenship (Palfreyman & McBride, 2010). In truth, academics and students have always moved across national borders; for example, from the 13th and 14th centuries, student mobility became a key feature of universities in Europe (Perraton, 2014). Of course the situation today is very different because of the large numbers of students and academics who travel to follow or present courses at higher education institutions elsewhere. Moreover (contrary to some perceptions), there is currently no undisputed academic language with a status matching that of Latin in the Middle Ages, because academic material is available in a wide variety of languages. Students and academics are schooled in many languages; and although English can be seen as similar to Latin in its status as the language of the academy, students and scholars can now also read and write about their disciplines in other languages.

Another striking difference from Medieval Europe can be found in the modern global student population, which is no longer so limited to an elite corps of wealthy and high-status men. At national level, governments and funding agencies actively encourage an increase in domestic student numbers in an attempt to broaden participation in higher education. Far from being limited to upper class males, higher education is now seen as a prerequisite for social mobility (among students and their parents) and for national, economic progress (among government agencies). In a UNESCO (2015) Education for All position paper, education is presented

as a key lever for development, is understood as a way of achieving social well-being, sustainable development and good governance. (pp. 1–2)

and post-basic and tertiary education are identified as priority areas. It is therefore clear that higher or tertiary education is expanding both in terms of international networks and in terms of increased access by minoritized communities nationally, all in the service of growth and development.

These increases in international student movement and in access to higher education at national level have led to increasing diversity of the student and staff body; and this is nowhere more evident than in the language profile of higher education institutions. Both types of change imply the spreading use of high-status, standardized codes (languages or language varieties) as well as minoritized, non-standard ones. As students become increasingly mobile and English is increasingly seen as a necessary condition for internationalisation (Van der Walt, 2013), it is easy to fall into a deficit perspective, focusing attention mainly on access measures that test English language proficiency, or on extensive academic support and development in English. Against this background,

language policies designed to support and promote indigenous languages can be perceived as problematic and even deleterious. (Balfour, 2007: 36)

This chapter and indeed this book argue from a different perspective: one that accepts the languages that students bring to their higher education studies as resources for learning, irrespective of the status or spread of such languages. The movement by policy-makers, students and academics towards English has, paradoxically, resulted in increased multilingualism on campuses, as increasing numbers of students from different language backgrounds use the lingua franca to access and develop knowledge and competencies in a variety of languages. As Hornberger and Link (2012) point out for pre-tertiary education,

[w]hether or not there is an officially or unofficially sanctioned medium of instruction, the rich and varied communicative repertoires educators, learners, and their families bring to school mean that what is inevitably occurring is biliteracy. (p. 243)

From the perspective of ‘language as resource’ (Ruiz, 1984), educational institutions are encouraged to use students’ language backgrounds to strengthen academic performance and concept literacy (Madiba, 2014), thus linking up with their language practices in non-academic contexts (and often in their future work contexts), where practices like code switching, multilingual note-making and translation are widespread. As García (2009a) points out,

if multilingualism in most of the world today is characterized by its widespread nature, along with the fuzziness of language boundaries and fluidity and multiplicity in language practices and language identities, then multilingual education must develop ways of supporting not only multiple languages and literacies, but also interrelated functional complementarity of language practices. (p. 157)

Developing such support is the main focus of this volume, by presenting case studies in higher education where the multilingual nature of student writing is evidence of a need for support for multiple languages and literacies. We will now consider how literacy is embedded in higher education contexts.

Literacy as Social Practice

That literacy is socially significant is is very clear, but its significance is viewed in different ways. Theorists such as Ong and Goody saw a ‘Great Divide’ of thought and culture separating ‘literate’ societies from ‘oral’ ones (Street, 1988). In some ways, a similar division is often seen between academic and non-academic life – although a view is often taken that any person who comes to study at university should already be ‘literate’ in a particular sense of having mastered in secondary education certain literacy skills (reading ‘deeply’, perhaps ‘critically’ and writing ‘clearly and correctly’) which are associated with academic ways of thinking. Language and cognition are linked in Vygotskyan-influenced concepts of languaging (Swain, 1985) and meaning-making (van Leeuwen, 2005), which suggest that engaging in processes of writing and reading can clarify and crystallize understandings. For this reason, ‘writing to learn’ has been proposed even in scientific disciplines which have traditionally had less focus on language (Reynolds et al., 2012).

On the other hand, the New Literacy Studies highlighted how ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ can refer to very different activities and skills, depending on the different social contexts in which they are used; thus

literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these are observable in [literacy] events which are mediated by written texts. (Barton & Hamilton, 2000: 9)

From this point of view, literacy becomes plural: each kind of social context has different ‘literacies’ associated with it. A specific text such as the one you are now reading is a product of a series of literacy events (authors, editors and publishers writing, discussing, critiquing and rewriting), which is largely structured by the social practice of academic publishing: conventions and expectations according to which knowledge is produced and distributed. It is also (we hope) the starting point for a further range of literacy events, as people read, reflect, annotate, cite, apply and/or adapt the ideas, words and organizing principles which they extract from this text, in their roles as researcher, teacher, student and so on.

The ‘academic literacies’ approach proposed by Lea and Street (1998) emphasizes the range and dynamic nature of literacies in higher education and the identity work involved in its development. We (writers and readers of this book) all participate in some way in an academic community; socialization into this community is an ongoing process which involves the individual as well as the community, thinking as well as language. For Duff (2010), academic discourse in general and academic literacy in particular is

a social, cognitive, and rhetorical process and an accomplishment, a form of enculturation, social practice, positioning, representation, and stance-taking. […] Academic discourse is therefore a site of internal and interpersonal struggle for many people, especially for newcomers or novices. […] Affective issues and tensions […] may be especially acute in intercultural contexts – in which local and global (or remote) language codes, cultures, and ideologies of literacy may differ; furthermore, the expectations of students producing academic language and those assessing it (instructors, journal editors, or reviewers) may be at odds. (p. 170)

Academic authors, editors, teachers and students engage with this process of enculturation, and through it with bodies of disciplinary knowledge/discourse (Kuteeva & Airey, 2014). The role of professors has typically been an active one, as they strive to make their mark by contributing to ongoing conversations through conference debates, journal articles and books; the role of the student has traditionally been a more receptive one. Yet the advent of online ‘new media’ or ‘social media’ such as blogs or social networking services has brought about a ‘changing balance of agency’ (Cope & Kalantzis, 2007: 76) in literacy practices among youth: readers increasingly become reader–writers, highlighting, commenting, remixing and reworking text and other content in ways that reflect their local context as well as the (often global) online communities in which they participate (Thorne & Ivkovic, 2015). The entry of a generation of students with this more agentic conception of literacy into an academic community which works in a parallel way but with a (traditionally) distinct body of knowledge, offers interesting ­possibilities for education.

In engaging with academic literacy practices, students and teachers make use of the linguistic resources at their disposal: their repertoire of forms, meanings and communicative acts, based upon various linguistic codes (varieties, registers, modes and often languages). A focus on a person’s communicative repertoire (rather than on a particular language or genre) is key to the ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Biliteracies in Higher Education
• 2. ‘No Way, I Could Never Write My Essays in Cantonese. I Only Know How to Do It in English’: Understanding Undergraduate Students’ Languages and Literacies at a Hong Kong University
• 3. Academic Biliteracy in College: Borderland Undergraduate Engineering Students’ Mobilization of Semiotic Resources
• 4. Translanguaging in University Literacy Practice: Bilingual Collaboration Around English Texts
• 5. Surfacing and Valuing Students’ Linguistic Resources in an English-Dominant University
• 6. Translation Narratives: Engaging Multilingual Learners in Translingual Writing Practices
• 7. Affirming the Biliteracy of University Students: Provision of Multilingual Lecture Resources at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa
• 8. Creative Collaboration in Higher Education: A Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol Case Study
• 9. Bilingual Academic Literacies for Chinese Language Teachers
• 10. Biliteracy as Policy in Academic Institutions
• 11. Afterword: Moving Forward with Academic Biliteracy Research
• Index