Academic and Research Literacy Practices of Final Year Teacher Trainees in Luanda, Angola

Academic and Research Literacy Practices of Final Year Teacher Trainees in Luanda, Angola presents a detailed study of students and lecturers at higher teacher training institutions where English is taught as a medium of instruction and specialisation. As such, the book will help raise the awareness of educators, teachers and supervisors of the need to be more supportive to students, and will highlight the importance of increased responsibility on the part of the students regarding their studies, especially during the process of writing their research reports.

Practical experience has shown that, in most classrooms, students are typically asked to produce texts for one single audience, namely the teacher or the lecturer, who already knows what constitutes an acceptable response. However, in many classrooms, teachers and lecturers tend to believe that literacy can be defined as the ability to encode and decode texts, the ability to decipher the ‘main idea’ of a reading passage or to write a text that obeys the general conventions of language usage such as syntax, organisation, and idea development.

The central argument of this book, however, is that, at higher levels of the educational system in Angola, academic and research literacy practices are, at best, questionable and, at worst, harmful. An extensive re-evaluation of assumptions regarding student capability and what it means to be a literate in the twenty-first-century ‘information society’ is of critical importance. Such a re-examination allows for extensive reflection on current practices and a powerful critique of ‘traditional’ academic and research literacy methods, and suggests ways in which practices of quality teaching and learning may be implemented.