This article analyses literacy narratives of first-year students at a South African university. It uses excerpts from the literacy narratives to explain how this writing genre serves as an outlet for reconstructing experiences of social injustice and agency. The article discusses how students' experiences of social injustice and their sense of…

This qualitative study takes a narrative approach to inquiring into the lived experiences of linguistically diverse students. As students are often placed into developmental education courses due to factors that point back to their linguistic diversity, scholarly literature demonstrates a need for inquiry that informs both research and practice.…

This paper reports on a study that examined the extent to which the development of academic literacy in isiZulu, an indigenous language spoken across all the nine provinces in South Africa, enhances opportunities for epistemological access. The focus is in relation to a pilot study of a Bachelor of Education Honours module that uses isiZulu as the…

This paper explores the multimodal engagement of English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) students in a classroom in Johannesburg. Within a social semiotic framework, and using constructions of design and identity to understand the students' multimodal engagement, the paper argues that multimodal representations offer EAL students from…

Explains the author's trip to a conference of English teachers in South Africa, focusing on how her time at the conference and during her travels afterward within South Africa (where teachers in local classrooms are struggling to help students communicate in a country that has 11 official languages) expanded her concept of literacy as a cultural…