Browsing by Author "Bangeni, Abongwe"

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    An analysis of the textual practices of undergraduate and postgraduate novice writers in law
    (Stellenbosch University, 2013) Greenbaum, Lesley Anne; Bangeni, Abongwe
    Criticisms in the media and in the law professions about the writing skills of law graduates have drawn attention to the challenges that novice law students experience in acquiring these skills at the foundation level. Our research project attempts to understand the nature of these challenges from multiple perspectives: firstly, by sourcing students' understandings of their challenges with legal writing through semi-structured interviews, followed by a close textual analysis of samples of their writing, as well as through feedback from teaching staff. In this paper, we present the findings of our textual analysis of their writing. We illustrate how their difficulties with legal writing manifest at the levels of content, concept and lexico-grammar and how the students' struggles with legal concepts had implications for their overall engagement with the content of the subject matter. At the level of content, students exhibited problems with the appropriate presentation of subject matter, achieving precision in their writing and showing evidence of an appreciation of what counts as tacit knowledge within the discipline, while at the lexico-grammatical level they struggled with tense, preposition and article use. The paper concludes by recommending some strategies for responding to these challenges while taking into account their resource implications.
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    Exploring the impact of (im)materiality on the literacy and meaning-making practices of first year students at a South African distance education institution: implications for support
    (2023) Isaacs, Lynne; Bangeni, Abongwe
    Open distance e-learning has been implemented at South African distance education institutions as a way to redress the inequalities of the country's apartheid past by way of enabling access to higher education for everyone, irrespective of location. Teaching and learning are delivered through modern electronic technologies, based on the assumption that students have access to and can use these technologies. The affordances of the objects that distance education students utilise as they engage in key literacy practices, as well as the spaces within which these practices take place, has not been given much empirical attention as a constituent aspect of distance education. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic foregrounded the significance of this focus when access to public spaces such as libraries or regional learning hubs became unavailable. This qualitative case study draws on the theory of (im)materiality (Burnett, 2015), Fenwick's (2015) notion of sociomateriality and its relevance to educational research, and Thomas Moore's theory of transactional distance (1997, 1989, 2018) to examine the ways in which distance education students' academic literacy and meaning-making practices are distributed across various personal and public sites and domains. In so doing it foregrounds the performativity of the distance education discourse through the material objects students use and the spaces which become materialised for learning. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 first-year distance education students to understand their use and perceptions of these objects and their negotiation of the spaces within which they are used. Drawing on Fairclough's (1992) model of Discourse, a critical discourse analysis of a key material object – the tutorial letter which is used for the mediation of the students' learning – was conducted to explore the ways in which students are positioned and its implications for power and access. The interview findings illustrate how technology functions to influence the participants' engagement with literacy practices, with significant implications for those whose access to technological objects is compromised. In doing so, the inequality of the spatial resources that students have access to and how it affects their meaning-making and learning is foregrounded. The less space that distance-education students have access to, the more their enactment of their distance-education identity is restricted, which heightens all four types of transactional distance they experience. ii The critical discourse analysis of the tutorial letters yielded two salient themes. The first relates to the implications of the use of intertextuality in the form of hyperlinks in the production and consumption of the tutorial letters and the potential for this to affect students' meaning-making practices. The second finding points to contrasting views of literacy in the tutorial letters where the autonomous and ideological approaches to literacy are utilised simultaneously, as reflected in the use of discourse at the level of text via pronouns and vocabulary. These findings raise important questions about students' access to material objects and the implications of their production and consumption for students' engagement. The study draws on the above findings to propose an expansion of the theory of transactional distance by suggesting that another type of distance be considered: that of the distance between the student and the physical learning space. The study also takes into account one of the critiques of the theory of sociomateriality, which states that the role of social structures is largely not considered in research on this subject. This study illustrates how the social structures in which the sociomaterial intra-actions occur are central to students' meaning making practices. In so doing, it contributes to the field of higher education through the insights it offers into the ways of being of distance-education students and the significance of access to a conducive learning space and material objects. The study concludes by providing recommendations that contribute to raising awareness of the impact of these on the literacy experiences of distance-education students.
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    Exploring the role of clinical educators written feedback in demystifying clinical reasoning skills within the clinical evaluation examination in Physiotherapy: Perspectives from disciplinary expects and novices
    (2024) Osman, Ayesha; Bangeni, Abongwe
    An Academic literacies (AL) approach to teaching emphasises the need to make disciplinary literacy practices explicit to disciplinary novices who are in the process of entering a discourse community. Clinical reasoning (CR) skills, i.e., the valued practices and ways of being and doing involved in clinical practice, are conveyed to Physiotherapy students in contexts such as clinical supervision. However, the way in which this happens within the key setting of a clinical examination has not been given enough empirical attention. The numerous studies in the field of Physiotherapy clinical evaluation are mostly quantitative and tend to focus on the reliability of assessment tools. Few investigate the role of written feedback in making the values of the disciplines explicit, or how this feedback is received by third year students who are new to clinical practice. This dissertation aims to explore the extent to which the clinical evaluation examination of third year Physiotherapy students at the University of Cape Town serves as a site for the explicit conveying of CR skills. It does this by exploring the role of written feedback provided by disciplinary experts, namely, clinical educators (CEs) to disciplinary novices and explores the extent to which the literacy event of the clinical evaluation provides space for making these explicit to students who are being assessed. The study addresses this question from three interlinked perspectives: firstly, through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of CEs' feedback in the evaluation rubric that is used to examine students' clinical performance. This is followed by a thematic analysis of interviews with the CEs to gain insight into the disciplinary values and practices on which they draw when assessing and providing feedback to students. The student perspective is assessed through questionnaires where they are required to reflect on their experience of receiving feedback and being socialised into CR for the purpose of becoming competent physiotherapists. The findings highlight the challenges students face when navigating and decoding written feedback as novices to clinical practice. Upon analysis of students' and CEs' perceptions, there is alignment in their understanding of the purpose of the written feedback. The strong themes of ‘knowing the basics' and ‘the importance of communication' emerged from the CE interviews, which is also mirrored in the student reflections. However, students expressed the need for more detailed feedback, as well as positive feedback to strengthen and support good performance. The findings yielded by the CDA of the feedback foregrounds CEs' practice of questioning, which is used as an educational strategy within clinical education, with the intention of developing students' CR skills. The CDA revealed that this practice extends to the CEs' written feedback as well, where the practice of questioning which shapes one literacy event, namely clinical supervision, is transposed onto another, i.e., the clinical examination, as part of providing written feedback. The data from the student questionnaires reflect how the vocabulary/language used within this questioning presents challenges for an effective engagement with the feedback. This study argues that students' challenge with navigating and decoding CEs' written feedback serves to reinforce the expert / novice divide, highlighting the powerful position from which the CEs respond. It is envisaged that the findings can assist CEs in enhancing their feedback practices through greater consciousness of students' access to the discourse. It may also be used to conscientize students about the thinking behind CEs' ways of providing feedback to improve their performance in clinical practice.
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    Language attitudes, genre and culture capital : a case study of EAL students' access to a foundation course in the Humanities at UCT
    (2001) Bangeni, Abongwe; Thesen, Lucia
    This dissertation explores the extent to which language and genre can be used to facilitate access for a group of first year students who have English as an additional language in the Humanities at the University of Cape Town enrolled in a foundation course. The use of the genre of the praise poem in the curriculum is used as a case study to address how the cultural capital that this group of students bring with them can be validated, the main aim being to facilitate access to the curriculum. In exploring students' attitudes to language and genre, data were collected mainly through the use of two questionnaires and interviews, where a qualitative analysis was done by drawing up the main themes which emerged and exploring the implications of these themes for the research question. The questionnaires aimed at identifying students' language preferences for academic writing (the choice being between their respective primary languages and English). The second questionnaire addresses the genre issue more closely by extending the question to include students' attitudes towards praise poetry while the first questionnaire asks about language preference in general. The second part of the research process deals with interviews, which I conducted with three of the students. The interviews were conducted with the aim of addressing the issues that emerged from the questionnaires; issues that I felt needed to be explored further in an interview context.
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    MBA student's engagement with the proposal process: implications for access
    (2019) Allison, Gadija; Bangeni, Abongwe
    The research component of the Master of Business Administration (MBA) is often cited by MBA students and graduates as the most daunting and challenging part of the MBA programme. This thesis draws on the tools of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1995, 2009) and insights from Academic Literacies to understand how novice researchers on the MBA programme at a South African Business School experience the proposal process which aims to prepare them for the writing of the research proposal and, by extension, the dissertation. The CDA assists in highlighting how students, as novice researchers, are positioned and expected to engage as researchers within a key document, the Dissertation Outline, which outlines the rules that govern the research process at the school. Discourse at the level of text shows how the undertaking of research, as well as assuming a specific researcher identity, is foregrounded through the use of textual features that reflect the values and dominant discourses within the programme and the School. The interview data illustrate how students’ actual experiences of the proposal process sit alongside these valued ways of doing and being that are foregrounded in the official documentation and the ways in which the students’ cultural capital impact their engagement with the process. The students’ interview data indicate how they experienced the proposal process as “challenging”, “anxiety-inducing” and “overwhelming”. This is evident in three main factors which shaped their experiences of the research process: the interlinked process of selecting a topic and securing a suitable supervisor; reconciling professional development goals with the valued types of research which are prioritised within the Research Methods course which forms part of the proposal process; and the impact of forms of cultural capital on their experiences of the proposal process. This results in a situation where the researcher identity which is explicitly foregrounded in the Dissertation Outline is questioned. This study illustrates the ways in which the data problematise the School’s assumptions about students’ levels of preparedness for the research process and, more specifically, for the writing of the proposal. The data highlight the importance of recognising that students’ experiences of the proposal process and challenges therein are not only influenced by academic literacy factors that are directly linked to the writing of the proposal, but also by non-textual factors which precede or happen alongside the writing of the proposal. The data further demonstrate how institutional practices impact on the students’ agency and power in the proposal process. This is due to the fact that while some forms of research are foregrounded as valued types of research in the Dissertation Outline, students’ experiences point to limited support in terms of available instruction and supervision for this type of research. The study’s findings highlight the importance of the nature of support provided to students navigating the transition from workplaces and different disciplinary contexts into the research component of the MBA. Based on the study’s findings, it is important that this support take the form of an ongoing dialogue between stakeholders such as supervisors, lecturers, Academic Support, and the Writing Centre. This would serve to address students’ access at various levels, from the nature of pedagogical practices on key courses such as the Research Methods course and how these function to prepare students, to the extent to which students are able to access and enact the valued ways that come with conducting research on the MBA programme.
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    Negotiating writing: a case study of the transition of English second-language Social Science graduates to postgraduate professional disciplines
    (2012) Bangeni, Abongwe
    This longitudinal, qualitative case study provides thick description of six English second-language (ESL) students' transition from Social Science disciplines to postgraduate study in the professional disciplines of Law and Marketing at a South African university. The study has two main objectives. Firstly, it aims to understand the ways in which the students perceive the literacy practices they bring to their new disciplines and how these contribute to their challenges with writing and with reconciling past and emerging disciplinary identities. The study's second objective is to explore the ways in which these perceptions manifest in students' writing.
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    UCT Accents
    (2018-06-29) Bangeni, Abongwe; Hutchings, Cathy; Madiba, Mbulungeni; McKinney, Carolyn; Rycroft, Alan
    During 2015, students and staff at UCT drew attention to a wide range of forms of discrimination, including racist and sexist practices experienced across the institution. One of the issues include prejudice on individuals accents when communicating in English. This short video is expressing the findings of the investigation on the issues of accents at UCT presented in a report by Glynnis Lloyd.