Currently most academic literacy (AL) courses in South Africa are decontextualized and generic, suggesting an autonomous view of literacy. This view is challenged by the new literacy studies, which see literacy as social practices embedded in context. Recent developments in AL research emphasize the need to focus on discipline-specific strategies that embed ALs in disciplines of study, rather than approaches which decontextualize AL. At a tertiary institution in SA, a literacy-as-social-practice approach to ALs was implemented through an institution-wide project focusing on integrating language and content in an attempt to transgress the narrow disciplinary boundaries that characterize the tertiary curriculum. This paper explores how 20 AL practitioners and disciplinary specialists integrated AL teaching into various disciplines. The findings suggest that higher education needs to create discursive spaces for the collaboration of AL practitioners and disciplinary specialists, to facilitate the embedding of AL teaching into disciplines of study. IntroductionThe study reported on in this paper is based on research into the role of academic literacies 1 within the disciplines and its implications for academic literacy (AL) teaching in higher education (HE). My research interest is in transforming current HE practices by developing a better synergy between the ALs that are taught at tertiary level and the disciplinary knowledge that students are accessing. This paper examines how tertiary educators construct their understandings of an integrated approach 2 to the teaching of ALs, by exploring the processes that occurred between a group of language lecturers/academic literacy practitioners (hereafter referred to as ALPs) and disciplinary specialists (DSs) at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) in South Africa, as they attempted to negotiate common understandings of AL practices within the mainstream tertiary curriculum.

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