Deep thinkers, critical readers and writers needed - theconversation.com
Making the adjustment from school to university is no easy task. For instance, there’s a big difference between writing a high school essay and crafting an academic paper which meets university standards.
In the decades since formal apartheid ended, South Africa’s universities have become increasingly accessible to students from different socioeconomic, schooling and linguistic backgrounds. But many of these students do not have the language or literacy skills to succeed at university level.
When I talk about “language”, I don’t mean that their level of fluency in English is the problem. In my long experience as a researcher and practitioner in the field of academic literacy, I have seen time and again that not only non-native English speakers struggle to transition from school to university. Many students, no matter what language they speak, lack the skills of critical thinking, analysis and logical reasoning.