Browsing by Author "Bangeni, Bongi"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Enabling Capabilities in an Engineering Extended Curriculum Programme
    (Bloomsbury Press, 2017-09) Craig, Tracy S; Bangeni, Bongi; Kapp, Rochelle
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    An exploration of the impact of students' prior genre knowledge on their constructions of 'audience' in a Marketing course at a postgraduate level.
    (Elsevier Ltd, 2013) Bangeni, Bongi
    This article explores the development of audience awareness for two English additional language (EAL) graduate students making the transition from undergraduate Social Science disciplines into the professional discipline of Marketing at a South African university. The article examines the ways in which their conceptualisations of 'audience' shape their negotiation of the generic move structure informing a dominant genre within the discipline: the written case analysis. I argue that the students' struggle with realising the communicative purposes of the genre in their analyses has implications for how they engage with disciplinary theory within crucial moves. Data yielded by semi-structured interviews, reflection papers, as well as selected case analyses written by the students in the initial months of their postgraduate year illustrate how this struggle can be traced to a mismatch between their embodied understandings of the concept of 'audience' which are transported from undergraduate learning contexts, and 'audience' as prescribed by the communicative purpose of the written case analysis within a professional discipline. In making this argument, the article examines the ways in which an antecedent genre, the Social Science argumentative essay, contributes to this mismatch. The article concludes by outlining the pedagogical implications of the findings from an ESP perspective.
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    A longitudinal study of students' negotiation of language literacy and identity
    (Taylor & Francis, 2011) Kapp, Rochelle; Bangeni, Bongi
    The article is based on a longitudinal, qualitative case study of 20 Social Science students at a historically 'white', English-medium, South African university. The participants in the study are all from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and/ or are speakers of English as a second language. Post-structuralist theory is used to analyse students' shifts in language and literacy attitudes and practices and in constructions of self over the course of their undergraduate years. The paper describes students' ambivalence as they attempted to constitute appropriate subjectivity and become academically successful within the discourses of the academy, whilst retaining connections to home discourses. The participants used their linguistic resources and social science discourses to process, rationalise and neutralise their ambivalence. The paper describes how they started off trying to maintain a notion of single identity, but over time became adept, self-conscious and less conflicted about shifting identities across contexts.
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    Negotiating between past and present discourse values in a postgraduate law course: implications for writing
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Bangeni, Bongi
    This article reports on some of the findings from a year-long qualitative case study which explores the transition experiences of seven ESL students from the Humanities into postgraduate studies located in the Law and Commerce faculties at a historically white university. Here I focus on two of the students who were registered for honours in Criminology and explore the ways in which undergraduate discourse values manifest in their writing. Focusing on one course, Criminal Law, and within that the legal problem question answer (PQA) genre, I draw on Toulmin's (1958) model of argumentation to investigate how the students established links between warrants and claims in adapting to the genre conventions and modes of argument construction within their new discipline. The data reflect that, in addition to struggles around form, the challenges encountered by the students can be attributed broadly to a tension between their embodied habitus and the epistemological characteristics of the new discipline. One manifestation of this is in their challenges with negotiating the communicative purposes of the PQA where they explore available spaces for Social Science oriented reasoning in a genre shaped by 'objective' tests and legal principles. The findings underscore the importance of actively engaging students on how their prior literacies impact on the process of negotiating the intellectual and cultural demands of specialised genres at postgraduate level.
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    Positioning (in) the discipline: undergraduate students' negotiations of disciplinary discourses
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Kapp, Rochelle; Bangeni, Bongi
    This paper is drawn from a longitudinal case study in which the authors have tracked the progress of 20 Social Science students over the course of their undergraduate degrees at a historically 'white' South African university. The students are all from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and/or speakers of English as a second language. The paper draws on post-structuralist and post-colonial theory to trace the process by which students position and reposition themselves in relation to disciplinary discourses over the course of their senior years. The students both absorb and resist the values of their disciplines. The authors argue that the process of writing in their disciplines is also a process of working out their own identities as they try to reconcile their home discourses with those of the institution and their peers, or in some cases, confirm or shed their home identities.
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    Shifting language Attitudes in a linguistically diverse learning environment in South Africa
    (Taylor & Francis, 2007) Bangeni, Bongi; Kapp, Rochelle
    This paper draws on post-structuralist theories on language and identity to explore the shifting language attitudes of 15 'black' students over the course of their undergraduate studies at a historically 'white' South African university. All the students speak an indigenous language as their first language. Those students who have been educated in racially mixed schools are relatively at ease in the environment and are able to straddle racial and linguistic boundaries. Those who have been educated in working-class, ethnically homogenous schools enter the institution with a strong desire to preserve their home languages and home identities. For them, English is equated with 'whiteness'. The paper describes the process through which this equation is questioned as English and institutional discourses become more dominant in students' lives, and as relationships with their home communities become strained. By the time the students enter their senior undergraduate years, a shared speech code emerges. The authors argue that this code signals students' dual affiliation to English (and the cultural capital it represents) and to their home identities. In mixing languages across boundaries of school background and across traditional ethnic barriers, the code also signals students' shared group identity as first-generation university students in post-Apartheid South Africa.
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    Successful students’ negotiation of township schooling in contemporary South Africa
    (University of the Free State, 2014-09) Kapp, Rochelle; Badenhorst, Elmi; Bangeni, Bongi; Craig, Tracy S; Janse van Rensburg, Vicki; le Roux, Kate; Prince, Robert; Pym, June; van Pletzen, Ermien
    This article draws on data from a larger longitudinal qualitative case study which is tracking the progress of students over the course of their undergraduate degrees at a South African university. For this paper, we used background questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with 62 first-year students from working-class, township schools who were first registered for Extended Degree Programmes in 2009. The article draws on post-structuralist theory on learning and identity to describe and analyse the participants’ perspectives on how they negotiated their high school contexts. We analyse the subject positions in which participants invested, as well as how they negotiated their way through social networks and used resources. Our data illustrate the ways in which students had to carry the burden of negotiating their way through home, school and neighbourhood spaces that were generally not conducive to learning. Nevertheless, participants consciously positioned themselves as agents. They were resilient, motivated and took highly strategic adult decisions about their learning. We argue that a focus on how successful students negotiate their environments challenges the pathologising paradigm of “disadvantage” that characterises research and debates in higher education. It also offers an additional lens for admissions processes and for providing appropriate intervention strategies in the tertiary setting.