Background: The Eastern Cape province in South Africa is a multilingual province where isiXhosa is the most widely spoken indigenous language. Learners seldom use English at home, and it remains, largely, the language of learning and teaching used at school. With the advent of dynamic technology, learners are widely exposed to social media, and…

Often, at universities, it is assumed that students will automatically find their 'voice' after a period of exposure to the academic field. What is not understood fully are the struggles that students with different levels of preparedness have in finding and asserting their academic voice, particularly in the academic writing genres necessary for…

Whilst research has been conducted on reading skills at primary school level in South Africa, not much research exists on writing, especially boys' writing. This article focuses on the use of an interactive questionnaire to get Grade 6 boys involved in research that is based on a cycle of the writing programme as prescribed by the Curriculum and…

Writing functions as an important tool that spans various spaces in higher education. Moving away from a 'skills approach' to writing, this article argues that the writing centre serves as an intermediary between students and academic lecturers. The article discusses how the current practices at the writing centre promotes the development of…

The varying literacy standards that undergraduate students represent are a reflection of their interim grasp of academic literacy (Paxton 2007). The aim of this study is to analyse a small group of undergraduate first-year students' depiction of their interim grasp of academic writing and to reflect on how lecturers use formative feedback to…

This study explored receptive vocabulary size and early literacy skills (namely: letter naming, knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences and early writing) in emergent bilingual Northern Sotho-English children. Two groups of Grade 1 learners were tested in both English and in Northern Sotho. Group 1 (N = 49) received their formal schooling in…