Texts, practices and student learning: a view from the South

Abstract

This article uses ‘close-up’ ethnographic research to provide an account of students’ engagement with learning in a South African university. Broadly based on Halliday’s (1973, 1978, 1994) understanding of texts resulting from contexts, the account challenges dominant constructions of the problems students encounter as stemming from the use of inappropriate ‘approaches’ to learning, the lack of ‘study’ and other skills or problems with proficiency in areas such as writing or language and shows how students’ unfamiliarity with the context of the university leads them to draw on ‘other’ contexts in order to engage with the texts they must read, write and listen to in the course of their studies. This drawing on ‘other’ contexts then results in the texts produced by students, and the practices which give rise to those texts, being inappropriate to the context of the university. Although the research on which the article is based took place in South Africa, it is argued that the theoretical perspective it provides has relevance across other contexts given the increasingly diverse student bodies which characterize higher education across the globe.