Provided that effective practices in online instructional design are met and e-myths regarding online learning are contested, asynchronous online sharing, knowledge construction, and knowledge creation or hybrids of these 51 Brokensha and GreylingDispelling e-myths and pre-empting disappointment discourses. Within a naturalistic higher education setting, the authors revisited lingual data analysed in a previous study, employing Booth and Hultén's (2003) taxonomy of pivotal contributions to online discussions to describe students' 'talk' during text-based AODs. The taxonomy constituted a more comprehensive model of productive online discussion than that used in the earlier study. Contrary to the authors' initial assumptions as novice e-instructors that students would not only share knowledge, but also co-construct knowledge, there was little evidence of the latter. In terms of Booth and Hultén's (2003) analytic contributions were uncommon. In other words, knowledge-sharing discourse rather than knowledge-construction discourse was the norm. In addition, mismatch between the authors' expectations about students' levels of cognitive engagement during their discussions and the instructional design. Thus, the authors interrogate their assumptions and identify design considerations that should underpin online pedagogy as it pertains to meaningful online discussion.
IntroductionCurrent South African government policies have obliged tertiary institutions to deal constructively with the needs of under-prepared incoming students (Department of Education 1997: 22). Access to tertiary education is currently more flexible than previously and is spurred by government grants and student loans. More students who do not meet the basic admission requirements are currently entering universities by means of bridging and extended programmes. The onus is on tertiary institutions to develop the skills of such students by means of academic development programmes (Yeld 2001: 6). Without the necessary language proficiency, these students remain at risk (Daly and Brown 2007: 2).The English Academic Language Course presented at the University of the Free State aims to develop students' skills in reading academic texts and their ability to write logically and express themselves clearly. This paper focuses on the reading component of the course. To emphasise the crucial role played by reading proficiency when it comes to tertiary education access, one must note the important competencies required by the tertiary student.Cliff and Yeld (2006) argue that student success in higher education studies can only be achieved if students are adequately equipped to - Theoretical underpinningsThe present study takes the successful reader as the benchmark, on the basis of the argument that the successful reader needs language knowledge, background knowledge, cognitive thinking ability, and metacognitive thinking ability (Carrell 1988: 241; Alderson 1984: 1; Grabe and Stoller 2002: 12) to engage successfully in academic reading. Language knowledgeThe phrase "language knowledge" refers to organisational knowledge, which encapsulates grammatico-syntactic and textual knowledge as well as pragmatic knowledge, which in turn encompasses functional and sociolinguistic knowledge (Bachman and Palmer 1996).Specifically, our emphasis was on vocabulary, discourse, and contextualised grammatical knowledge, as well as on coherence processing in the context of pragmatic-textual competence. In the first-year module in question, each one of these has implications for the reading classroom where these competencies are systematically taught and fostered so as to encourage the strategic reading of texts.Vocabulary knowledge is "critical not only for reading but also for all [second language] skills, for academic performance and for related background knowledge" (Grabe and Stoller 2002: 76). Successful readers of academic texts need to know approximately 95% of words Background knowledgeKey to any reader's fluency is the background knowledge s/he adds to the text. "The construction of meaning depends on the reader's knowledge of the language, the (discursive) structure of texts, a knowledge of the subject of the reading and a broad-based background or world knowledge" (Day and Bamford 1997: 14). Readers who come from a print-poor background often have little understanding of print conventions, text genres and how these dif...
The field of Philosophical Linguistics, Weideman (2006: 2) argues in his work Beyond Expression, prompts linguists to interrogate their foundational premises, namely that 'the various scientific disciplines, including the special field of linguistics, are always implicitly or explicitly informed by some philosophical trend [and that] it is sheer foolishness to disregard this in one's specialist field today'. This foolishness, Weideman (2006: Chapter 16) points out, led to somewhat immature arguments between Chomsky and his critics in the 1970s and beyond. In my view, this is one of the major contributions of Beyond expression. In the Dooyeweerdian tradition, the author creates a framework for dealing with the lingual aspect of experience within the totality of humankind's experience of reality. He presents a systematic outline of how the Structural-Empirical Method (SEM) may be used to deal with the normative and the factual dimensions of experience as a reciprocally-related and integrated interface. The author argues from the premise that reality is a subjective creation -neutrality or objectivity, as he states in the opening sentence of the text, is '[o]ne of the die-hard myths of modern thought'. He confesses -and then ably demonstrates -that the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea represents a methodological approach which allows the theorist to lay bare the often unarticulated philosophical premises that infuse (if not hijack) theorists' thinking. The author provides a meta-language not only for reflecting critically on existing linguistic theories, but also for generating new perspectives on the basis of a systematic analysis of analogies between the lingual aspect and other modes of experience.Although dated -and the author acknowledges this limitation in his preface -this work illustrates how linguists may develop an integrative view of the lingual aspect of experience by exploring the analogies that obtain between the lingual aspect and the pre-/post-lingual modes of existence. These analogies, captured in retrocipations and anticipations, are viewed strictly from the lingual aspect of experience. I say, 'strictly', because the author's choice is to focus primarily on elementary linguistic concepts, albeit that he acknowledges (and interrogates) the role of complex linguistic concepts which emanate from a multi-modal approach (accounting for the complex interactions when lingual phenomena are constructed from, among others, the points of view of the other modes of experience, the norm-fact relationship, and the volitional actions of lingual subjects who not only dynamically shape linguistic reality within the constraints of lingual constancy, but also bring to bear on the process their Archimedean points of departure).One of the key complex linguistic concepts that permeate the author's arguments is the relationship between the normative and the factual sides of reality, an interwovenness which has bearing on all the elementary linguistic concepts explored in this text. He shows how the structuralists' red...
In this article we argue that Kelly's construct psychology (Kelly 1955; 1966/2003) provides a useful framework for mentoring in the Higher Education sector in South Africa. Kelly's notion of constructive alternativism prompts practitioners to adopt a questioning attitude to life in HE; newly appointed academic staff members and their mentors have to be open to new experiences and new constructions of meaning, engaging in a reciprocal relationship typically prompting participants consciously to pursue critical reflection, innovation and transformative learning. We recorded and analysed discursive exchanges (± 130 pages of transcriptions) from two mentor-mentee relationships at the primary author's institution. We used Kelly's theory to identify and interrogate a range of work-related constructs. In addition, we applied Hardy, Palmer and Phillips's discourse-based management model to monitor the outputs of our mentoring. We used Herrmann's principles of learning style flexibility as an additional awareness-raising tool to promote a holistic approach to the scholarship of mentoring (Herrmann 1996). We conclude the article with suggestions for mentoring in the HE sector.
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