3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item A social constructivist approach to writing centre practice: challenges of raising academic genre awareness through group writing consultations(2019) Shabanza, Kabinga JackFor the past decade, South Africans universities have been grappling with an exponential increase in the number of new entrants, mostly from previously disadvantaged backgrounds and schools; who are often un- or underprepared for higher education. As a result, in academic support services such as writing centres, group writing consultations (GCs) have been implemented as a strategy to cater for more students with limited resources, personnel, and time. The facilitation of a GC however presents new and unsurmountable challenges for writing consultants, due to its complexity and difference from the one-on-one or individual consultation. This thesis used the Social Constructivist, New Literacies Studies (NLS), Academic Literacies, and Writing Centre Practice lenses to investigate the challenges faced by students and writing consultants in GCs, and whether GCs assist in raising the students’ awareness of academic and disciplinary genres. The rationale behind this study is that the GC may provide an environment, which is conducive to the learning and practice of these academic and disciplinary genres. Data was collected in two phases: through questionnaires, focus groups, video observations in 2014, and additional questionnaires in 2016, each time with students and consultants. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used for the quantitative data analysis of the questionnaire data sets, and Atlas.ti7 was utilised for the qualitative content analysis of the focus group and video observation data, both through a deductive approach. The study identified key social constructivist features of the GC such as collaboration among students, multiple perspectives, peer learning, development of student voice, and consultant positive attitude. The main finding was that GC discursive practices centred on social interactions through questioning as a GC facilitation strategy, group discussion, collaboration, modelling, as well as facilitation through explanation, clarification, and elaboration. The study found that, if not dealt with by the writing consultant, factors such as non-participation or dominance by a few group members, the unpreparedness of students, a consultant’s negative attitude, an outspoken consultant, the lack of time, and group disorganisation, could impede effective social interactions and learning in the GC. The findings highlighted the group consultation dynamics, particularly its pedagogical perspective, thereby enriching the existing literature which has been focusing on peer group writing, group discussions, and writing circles. It brought new insights in the domain of writing, and its combination of theories and principles of New Literacies Studies (NLS), Social Constructivism with its ZPD and Academic Literacy (AL) model together with writing centre theory and writing centre practices, yielded new insights and newness in writing skills practices, boosted by social interactions and peer learning. The study also foregrounded the shift in South African universities’ writing centre practices, from the one-on-one or Individual Consultations (IC) model to the GC model that resulted from ever-increasing numbers of students from previously disadvantaged backgrounds in South Africa, who get admission to universities. The significance of this study resides in that, for AL and writing centre practitioners, as well as departmental academic staff, awareness of this social constructivist nature of the GC can assist in focusing the GC practices on social interactions, in attempts to familiarise students with disciplinary genres, rather than solely on the writing process or the text itself. Priority should be given to practices conducive to effective social interactions and learning.Item Structural analysis of source code plagiarism using graphs(2017) Obaido, George RabeshiPlagiarism is a serious problem in academia. It is prevalent in the computing discipline where students are expected to submit source code assignments as part of their assessment; hence, there is every likelihood of copying. Ideally, students can collaborate with each other to perform a programming task, but it is expected that each student submit his/her own solution for the programming task. More so, one might conclude that the interaction would make them learn programming. Unfortunately, that may not always be the case. In undergraduate courses, especially in the computer sciences, if a given class is large, it would be unfeasible for an instructor to manually check each and every assignment for probable plagiarism. Even if the class size were smaller, it is still impractical to inspect every assignment for likely plagiarism because some potentially plagiarised content could still be missed by humans. Therefore, automatically checking the source code programs for likely plagiarism is essential. There have been many proposed methods that attempt to detect source code plagiarism in undergraduate source code assignments but, an ideal system should be able to differentiate actual cases of plagiarism from coincidental similarities that usually occur in source code plagiarism. Some of the existing source code plagiarism detection systems are either not scalable, or performed better when programs are modified with a number of insertions and deletions to obfuscate plagiarism. To address this issue, a graph-based model which considers structural similarities of programs is introduced to address cases of plagiarism in programming assignments. This research study proposes an approach to measuring cases of similarities in programming assignments using an existing plagiarism detection system to find similarities in programs, and a graph-based model to annotate the programs. We describe experiments with data sets of undergraduate Java programs to inspect the programs for plagiarism and evaluate the graph-model with good precision. An evaluation of the graph-based model reveals a high rate of plagiarism in the programs and resilience to many obfuscation techniques, while false detection (coincident similarity) rarely occurred. If this detection method is adopted into use, it will aid an instructor to carry out the detection process conscientiously.Item Writing-centred supervision for postgraduate students(2016) Chamberlain, CherylOver the last decade there has been a considerable increase in research which centres on postgraduate supervision and research supervision has recently changed significantly (Grant, 2010; Walker, 2010; McCallin and Nayar, 2012). For some time postgraduate pedagogy has taken a lesser role in supervision practice compared with the role of supervisor as researcher. More recently supervision pedagogy has taken a more central role in the supervision debates and there is recognition of research teaching as a necessary and sophisticated skill (Grant, 2010; Walker, 2010; McAlpine and Amundsen, 2011). This shift in doctoral training away from viewing the thesis as a product to a pedagogy of training has resulted in a growing field of interest in postgraduate research writing. The emphasis on the research supervision role is beginning to acknowledge the work on postgraduate academic writing (Caffarella and Barnett, 2000; Kumar and Stracke, 2007; Aitchison and Lee, 2010; Catterall et al., 2011; McCallin and Nayar, 2012; Lee and Murray, 2015). However, for many supervisors writing is still seen as ‘marginal or ancillary’ to the real work of research and consequently there is very little research that ‘opens out the complexity of PhD writing practice’ (Kamler and Thomson, 2001, 6). This research, located in two disciplines in a Science faculty in a research-intensive university in South Africa, provides a local perspective on supervision pedagogy and research writing in a Science Faculty. In this thesis, research writing is seen as contextualized social practice in that supervision and writing practices have implications for the development of individual research writers. Within the institution there is little discussion between supervisors or between supervisors and their postgraduate students around research writing. There needs to be sensitivity to the disparate needs of individual students in the context of their research writing. Historically in the context of this thesis, this related to opening up academic literacy practices to historically disadvantaged undergraduate students, but more recently has widened to include all students, including postgraduate students. It has become increasingly important to find out what the writing challenges and practices are for postgraduate students and their supervisors, not only by focusing on their research texts but also by critically engaging with written feedback given to these students as they struggle to engage with the academic discourse of the institution. This research employs a qualitative approach to investigate the flow of events and processes related to the writing aspect of supervision and the perceptions and reported experiences of both postgraduate students and their supervisors. The thesis considers how participants understand these using a case study approach, consisting of eleven pairs of supervisors their Masters and doctoral students. A variety of data sources are employed including interviews with the participants, and drafts of student writing with written feedback from supervisors. Some aspects of supervision and postgraduate research writing remain hidden from view as these practices are intensely personal, revolving around the identities of those taking part and power relations which centre on both the relationship between co-supervisors and the supervisor-student relationship. This thesis puts forward a new model of co-supervision i.e. a writing-centred co-supervision model with a content supervisor and a writing supervisor both located within the discipline. This co-supervision model allows the writing co-supervisor to provide a ‘safe space’ in the writing process for the student. Significantly issues of power between the co-supervisors remain inherent in this model of co-supervision and thus research writing remains to a large extent on the margins of academic work. A further finding relates to the research writing issues identified by supervisors and/or postgraduate students mainly linked to positioning viz. structure; coherence; argument and flow; voice; and audience. There is little pre-thinking about the process of assisting postgraduate students to write. Despite the identification of some writing issues (either by supervisors and /or students), these are not always linked to strategies to enable students to overcome their writing difficulties. The analysis shows that the majority of these relate to the process of research writing and positioning issues (argument, voice, and audience). Furthermore these strategies are not always made explicit when supervisors work with students and surprisingly there is little match between those suggested by supervisors and those utilised by their students. Central to this research is the nature of written feedback given to postgraduate students. Supervisors’ knowledge of their written feedback practices is critical. The diverse feedback practices of the supervisors are uncovered using a new analytic feedback framework illustrating a continuum of feedback practices varying from big picture feedback; superficial surface-level feedback; and a combination of the two – mixed feedback. An analysis of the findings show that the majority of the supervisors use mixed feedback as their modus operandi. It is suggested that a shared meta-language regarding feedback would allow supervisors to open a space for an improved feedback dialogue both with their colleagues and with their postgraduate research students.Item How IsiZulu speakers use cohesion in English in their academic writing(2016) Drummond, Andrew MeikleAchievement rates in higher education in South Africa for black students remain low after 20 years of democracy. Writing academic English according to existing conventions is a complex skill. One aspect of this skill is producing dense, cohesive text. The writing of a group of IsiZulu speakers at Wits is analyzed to find out how Hallidayan (1976) cohesion is operating therein: how does this language group use conjunctions, lexical cohesion, referencing, ellipsis and substitution when writing in English? In addition, it explores whether differences in how IsiZulu and English are structured create problems with cohesion for these undergraduates when writing in English. Furthermore, it aims to uncover if the rhetorical structure of IsiZulu influences the organization and the cohesion of their English texts. From this analysis, it is evident that there are elements of referencing, conjunction use and lexical cohesion which are well developed in their writing. At the same time, evidence of speech-type syntax in the data points to areas where further development is possible. This knowledge has led to suggestions on how academic literacy input could facilitate writing skills development for this language group. The investigation has also established the dominance of English rhetorical organisation in both the English and IsiZulu writing of this cohort. It has also shown that these students experience rhetorical conflict when instructed not to use repetition as a meaning-making strategy in their writing. Both a pragmatic and a critical response to these findings has been provided. The pragmatic response is a set of suggestions on how to develop language skills in the area of cohesion. The critical response is a proposal for an alternative style of academic textual organisation with stronger links to IsiZulu oral rhetoric practices. Key words: Cohesion in IsiZulu, cohesion in English, IsiZulu rhetoric, English rhetoric, academic literacy, transformation in tertiary educationItem Assessment practices in a first year academic writing module at the University of the Witwatersrand and the National University of Rwanda.(2008-07-03T10:50:58Z) Nyiratunga, RithaABSTRACT Scholars in the field of assessment recognize its key role in teaching and learning (Knight 1998, Brown and Knight 1996, Gipps 1994, Glaser 1990, Van Rooyen and Prinsloo 2003). According to Knight, assessment is ‘the most significant prompt for learning’ (1998:37). This study aimed to understand the role and the nature of assessment in academic literacy modules offered in two very different teaching and learning contexts. The focus of the research is ‘Foundation in English Language’ at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and ‘Writing English I’ at the National University of Rwanda (NUR). To conduct the investigation, three lecturers teaching on the Foundation module at Wits and, two lecturers teaching Writing English I at the NUR were interviewed individually and six students from each lecturer’s group participated in a focus group interview. In addition to the interviews, all the assignment and examination tasks, as well as students’ marked assignments and examination scripts were analysed. Although the study reveals many differences in both attitudes and practices in the two institutions, it also shows some similarities, especially in relation to students’ negative response to participation in one on one consultation with a lecturer. The most important difference noticed is in the role of assessment in the two modules. It was found that in the Writing English I module at NUR, assessment is considered separate from the teaching and learning process, whereas at Wits it is an integral part of the process. This difference in orientation to assessment influenced much of the planning and assessment of the two modules. In the Foundation module at Wits, assessment was planned into the course. Consequently, assignments were carefully scaffolded to promote students’ learning in regard to academic writing, with feedback given on essay drafts. At NUR where assessment was not planned into the course there was no clear focus on some important aspects of academic writing such as referencing and writing from sources without plagiarizing and there was no scaffolding of the assignments or feedback on drafts. The study concludes with some recommendations to lecturers and students and also to the leadership of the institutions, given that some of the recommendations have resource implications.