Academic Biliteracies
Research on academic literacy within higher education has focused almost exclusively on the development of academic literacy in English. This book is unique in showing how students use other languages when they engage with written academic content – whether in reading, discussing or writing – and how increasingly multilingual higher education campuses open up the possibility for students to exploit their multilingual repertoires in and around reading/writing for academic purposes. Chapters range from cases of informal student use of different written languages, to pedagogical, institutional and disciplinary strategies leveraging multilingual resources to develop biliteracy. They are ordered according to two dominant themes. The first includes accounts of diverse multilingual contexts where biliteracy practices emerge in response to the demands of academic reading and writing. The second theme focuses on more deliberate attempts to teach biliteracy or to teach in a way that supports biliteracy. The collection will be of interest to researchers, higher education practitioners and students of multilingual higher education and academic literacy.
David M. Palfreyman is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Zayed University, UAE. His research interests include language, culture and learning in postsecondary education and he is the co-editor of Learning and Teaching Across Cultures in Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Christa van der Walt is Professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her research interests include the role of English in multilingual, academic contexts and she is the author of Multilingual Higher Education (Multilingual Matters, 2013).