Integrated academic literacy development: Learner-teacher autonomy for MELTing the barriers

Abstract

Effective and continuing development of tertiary students’ academic literacy during their undergraduate years has become a crucial issue for Anglophone universities into the 21^st century. Research into pedagogies aimed at supporting students’ academic literacy development has pointed to the inadequacy of generic approaches delivered as remedial support services, and has called instead for the integration of the teaching and learning of academic literacy into discipline content courses. Successful models tended to require collaboration between discipline and communication specialists. However, reluctance by discipline specialists to engage with language in favour of content teaching, and financial implications of collaboration represent two major barriers to the uptake and scalability of curriculum-integrated academic literacy development. This paper describes a collaborative approach to genre pedagogy that has the potential for overcoming the content-language dichotomy and also the cost barrier. It provides a method for the discipline lecturer’s progress from initial dependence on the literacy specialist’s expertise towards learner and teacher autonomy. The pedagogy is demonstrated by two Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching (MELT) that are derived from the Research Skill Development framework. This paper describes the two models and their potential role in overcoming barriers to curriculum-integration of academic literacy development.