Browsing by Author "Sebolai, Kabelo"

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    Academic literacy curriculum renewal at a South African university: A case study
    (Journal for Language Teaching, 2015) Sebolai, Kabelo; Huff, Lindsay
    he number of students admitted by universities in South Africa has grown tremendously in the past two to three decades. Most of these students, however, graduate from high school without having gained the academic literacy ability required for success at university. A result of this has been that the students struggle to handle the demands of university education in English, the medium of instruction at these institutions. This causes them to fail to complete their studies in the scheduled time and even to drop out. South African universities have responded to this challenge by introducing academic literacy programmes to help the students bridge the language gap between high school and university. These universities spend large sums of money on academic literacy development requirements such as teachers, learning materials and general administration. It is important therefore that the academic literacy courses offered by such universities are effectively designed and taught. The Central University of Technology (CUT) introduced its first academic language programme in 2007. To date, three academic language courses have been offered under the auspices of this programme. The first of these courses was borrowed from another university and was taught at CUT until the end of 2009. The second one was developed by the academic language development staff inside CUT and was introduced at the beginning of 2010. The whole of 2013 was spent on designing and developing yet another academic language course inside the university, which was introduced in January 2014. This paper is a case study of the curriculum renewal process that went into this project.
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    The National Benchmark Test of quantitative literacy: does it complement the Grade 12 Mathematical Literacy examination?
    (South African Journal of Education, 2017-02) Le Roux, Natalie
    The National Senior Certificate (NSC) examination in South Africa is a standardised assessment whose main function is to determine whether Grade 12 learners have mastered subject knowledge at the culmination of their secondary education. Alongside this, the National Benchmark Test Project (NBTP) was introduced to develop the National Benchmark Tests (NBTs) that are aimed at assessing the academic readiness of first time entry students to South African universities. This article explores the relationship between these two standardised assessments in the domain of mathematical/quantitative literacy. This is accomplished through a Pearson correlation analysis of 6,363 test scores obtained by Grade 12 learners on the NSC Mathematical Literacy examination and the Quantitative Literacy test of the NBT in 2012. The results reveal a curvilinear relationship between these two sets of results. This indicates that the two assessments are related but not identical, and the paper argues that their complementarity suggests the value of using performance information generated by both for access and placement.