First-year students’ (pre)writing experiences: knowledge schema and authorial identity
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Date
2020
Authors
Matshedisho, Knowledge Rajohane
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Abstract
Academic writing is one of the major challenges that confront first-year
undergraduate students. This challenge is most evident in writing-intensive
courses like sociology. This study explores the writing experiences of first-year
health sciences students enrolled in Sociology as part of their basic sciences
curriculum. It tries to find out how the students understood and experienced
the process of writing the reflective essay from the pre-writing to the writing
process. The study used tutorial response papers and interviews to collect the
data. Document and thematic analyses guided the data analysis. The
academic literacies framework guided and framed the study. Findings
suggested that students’ writing experiences are mediated by uncertainty
about how to write at university compared to how they used to write in school.
This uncertainty is explained through the ‘interim literacies’ concept. Students
draw on their interim literacies and a range of resources and strategies as they
grapple with academic writing and begin to develop authorial identities
suitable for academic writing, some more successfully than others. In
considering and conceptualising the findings, the argument of this research
report is that a theoretical conversation between academic literacies and the
social-realist perspective suggests that the two perspectives should not be
polarised but instead seen as mutually supportive with implications for
improving writing pedagogy for first-year students.
Description
A research report submitted in partial fulfilment of the academic requirements for the degree of Master of Education to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2020