During the pandemic many first-time entering students used online teaching and learning platforms. Academic Literacy was also taught online, which was not done previously. Recently students have returned to campuses for face-to-face tuition. Upon their return it is evident that students are struggling to convey meaning through their writing because English is not their mother tongue, and it seems that covid has exacerbated this problem because students did not write as frequently as they had done in the past. Therefore, this paper seeks to explore how students feel about their level of writing and provide practical solutions to improve the writing skills of students. A qualitative approach for collecting data was utilized using semi-structured interviews. The findings reveal that first-time entering students have difficulty expressing themselves through writing and have not mastered academic writing. The overarching recommendation is that the academic writing as a module should be recurriculated and that a practical hands-on approach using innovative technology and multimodal discipline specific approach is used to improve the academic writing of first-time entering students.

Authors:
Brenton Grant Fredericks, Central University of Technology, South Africa
Tsepho Louw, Central University of Technology, South Africa

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Brenton Fredericks is currently a Senior lecturer at the Central University of Technology, Free State.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Sunday Schedule

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