Breaking the codeAn academic literacies approach to building students’ reading and writing capability: An academic literacies approach to building students’ reading and writing capability

This session addresses two key questions:
1. What are students’ main areas of difficulty in relation to academic literacy?
2. How does an embedded approach support students’ academic literacy development?
One of the key barriers to student learning in 21st century higher education is academic reading and writing (Arum and Roksa, 2012). The problem is accentuated on highly applied and practical courses and in new universities with diverse intakes of students. Football Studies at Solent has 297 students, 90% male, with low entry grades. This proposal directly addresses the problem using an embedded approach to academic and critical literacies, situating these skills in meaningful contexts so that students not only better understand their subject but can read, write and talk about it with confidence (Wingate, 2006; Lea, 2004).
Using a theoretical framework of critical literacy (Luke, 2000; Wilson, 2004), we identify four roles of readers in relation to texts – code-breaker; text participant; text user and text analyst - and use these to explore how an embedded approach can help to develop students as critical readers and writers. Using our experience of embedding academic literacy in module design, we will show how using in-class active reading tasks and low-stakes writing activities have helped students not just to ‘code-break’ academic texts, but to grapple with their meaning, ask critical questions and begin to develop their own academic writing voice.