This article argues that despite students facing obstacles when studying remotely and online through the COVID-19 pandemic, some are able to overcome barriers to achieve their academic goals. While formal methods are used to evaluate teaching and learning, the five teacher educator researchers in this study sought to understand pre-service…

Background: Much of the research in literacy focuses on what learners fail to do, especially in the early grades, but it is equally important to research successful readers. In particular learners' experiences with literature contribute to our understanding of the possibilities literary texts offer. This article focused on learners' responses to…

Although viewed (and dismissed) by many as primarily a tool for communication, language (and literature) cannot be understood only in relation to "what" it communicates. A study of "how" it is shaped uncovers the social forces that provide its broad and complex template in the acts of reading and writing. This article focuses…

This article takes a multimodal social semiotic approach to analysing educational textbooks. We are interested in the ways in which educational textbooks contribute to designing our social futures by constructing both the student and the discipline in a particular manner. While a textbook's primary purpose is to provide the reader with knowledge…

Reading for pleasure is a topic often overlooked in literacy research. Given reading for pleasure's personal, academic, and social relevance, it should be considered a foreground factor in literacy studies. This case study draws from a sociocultural approach and uses Third Space Theory and Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory of Reading to explore…

Results on the PIRLS test in 2006 make it clear that South African educators need to examine the way in which they teach literacy in the Foundation phase. While the test gives a fair indication of what our children cannot do, it is less clear about what they can do. Mastery of decoding, for example, is assumed and children are tested on their…

Many under-prepared university students do not know how to study (Martin and Arendale 1993) because they have not yet developed the abstract reasoning skills that allow them to learn new ideas simply by reading a text or listening to a lecture. This article draws from selected findings from a PhD study currently being undertaken at a university in…

This article explores the emergence of multimodality as intrinsic to the learning, teaching and assessment of English in the Twenty-First Century. With subject traditions tied to the study of language, literature and media, multimodal texts and new technologies are now accorded overdue recognition in English curriculum documents in several…

Investigates whether responses to literature of South African adolescents from three subcultures varied with reference to values inherent in a text and whether these differences might be attributed to differences in the value systems of the respondent's subcultures. Confirms these expectations. (SR)

Access to the textual world of academia requires that learners are familiar with the critical open-ended questioning stance demanded by textuality. Anecdotal evidence suggests that learners registered for the Bachelor of Education Honours degree are unable to generate appropriate questions to interrogate academic text, impacting on their ability…