Thesen & van Pletzen's edited volume collects eight essays by South African scholars working in the area of New Literacy Theory. The chapters shed light on local literacy practices that are essential to the construction and understanding of academic literacies in a multilingual society where English, the medium of instruction, is an additional language for most students. The editors maintain that the authors look “closely at [their] practice, and attempt to theorize from where [they] stand” (p. 3). The introduction provides a useful history of the institution and the political context – the emergence from apartheid – in which it operates. Additionally, the case is made for situating this research in New Literacy Studies because of its “emphasis on socio-political understandings of multiple literacy practices” (13), validating the authors' theoretical reliance on such scholars as Gee, Gough, and Halliday.
Rochelle Kapp's research comes from an ethnographic study she did in a Black township's secondary school. In chap. 1, Kapp argues that “teachers' notions of appropriate English literacy are inextricably bound to their construction of their students as border-crossers” (32). The teachers under study are concerned not only with how their students will be perceived in a more diverse South African society but also that their students maintain their Xhosa identity. Relying on Bakhtin's concept of genre, Stella Clark argues in chap. 2 that science teachers' requirement that students explain scientific premises in their own words in a “friendly letter” assignment sets the students up for failure. Because of a mixing of genres, students are denied access to scientific discourse when this discourse is not explicitly taught.
In chap. 3, Bongi Bangeni & Rochelle Kapp investigate how student identities develop in relation to the transition from a home discourse to an academic discourse. Similarly, in chap. 4 an ethnographic study provides Moragh Paxton with illustrations of how students transition into academic discourse by building on previous discourses to construct “hybrid interim literacies” (85).
Ermien van Pletzen's research in chap. 5 focuses on the reading experiences of first-year medical students, indicating that students were underprepared for psychosocial readings because these readings required the students to read for purposes other than to acquire content information concerning the science of medicine. In chap. 6, Arlene Archer describes how engineering students' use of semiotic resources is altered or mixed based on their subjectivities regarding information with which they are working. Lucia Thesen, in chap. 7, focuses on “the need to study the place of lectures in the flow of meaning in universities” (152) by concentrating on the verbal/visual aspects of the encounter and how various students understand these encounters. Last, in chap. 8, Gideon Nomdo, relying on Bourdieu's notion of capital, illustrates how two successful Black students use various forms of capital in their academic success.
The research presented in this volume is intriguing and solidly grounded in literacy theory, with the theory woven into the research in such a way that novices to literacy studies will gain valuable insights into the foundations of that field while more seasoned scholars will gain from the solid research being presented.
