A Bourdieusian approach to academic reading: reflections on a South African teaching experience

Abstract

As in many other parts of the world, ‘academic literacy’ has emerged as both a concern and a contested concept in South African universities. In this article we focus specifically on academic reading, which we argue is a relatively underemphasized aspect of academic literacy. This article is the product of reflections on academic reading during and subsequent to the development and presentation of a postgraduate module presented at Stellenbosch University. It briefly explores the literature on academic literacy; develops the Bourdieusian perspective on academic reading that we used to develop the module; and concludes with a discussion of the module. Our intention was to make ‘reading as social practice’ more visible to students. Bourdieu's concepts of ‘competence’, ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ set the scene for a discussion of the role of reading in different disciples and more generally within the social sciences and humanities.

Keywords:

• academic reading
• academic literacy
• language
• higher education
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, and Rocío Ferreyro and Georgina Andrada for their assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. An exception is Craswell and Poore (2012), which explores the role of reading in ‘building a position'.

2. The defence of Afrikaans as an academic medium at Stellenbosch University and a number of other ‘historically Afrikaans universities’ is typically associated with a minimal right to read in Afrikaans (in the form of administrative documents, course outlines etc.).

3. Bourdieu (1991, 59) defines habitus as ‘precisely this immanent law, lex insita, inscribed in bodies by identical histories, which is the precondition not only for the coordination of practices but also for practices of co-ordination’.

4. Model C schools are historically white public schools that obtained a degree of autonomy within the public school system after 1994. Thus, while they are increasingly integrated in terms of race, their relative wealth and exclusivity has put them at the centre of debates about the emerging class structure of the post-apartheid education system.

5. This argument is developed in Hill (2009).

6. The initial intention was to introduce this as a new module in the postgraduate curriculum. This was however not feasible, but aspects of this module have been used in both undergraduate and postgraduate modules – most notably the second year sociology of communication module.

7. Choices with respect to racial nomenclature are always difficult. In this article unmarked references to race follow current South Africa legal conventions, in terms of which ‘black’ is a umbrella term that includes ‘Africans’, ‘Indians’ and ‘coloureds’.

8. In November 2014 the Council of the University adopted a new policy that enshrines both English and Afrikaans as media of instruction at undergraduate level.

9. In South Africa ‘honours’ is a separate fourth-year qualification, which usually follows a three year bachelor's degree.

Additional information

Funding

The module and research presented in this article were supported by the Fund for Innovation and Research into Learning and Teaching, administered by the Centre for Teaching and Learning Stellenbosch University.