Bridging the gap: Academic literacy among first-year students in rural South African universities

Résumé

This qualitative study investigated the role of academic literacy in shaping first-year students’ academic engagement and success at three rural South African universities. Guided by the interpretivist paradigm and informed by the Academic Literacies Framework and social constructivist theory, the study employed a multiple case study design. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews with academic literacy practitioners and disciplinary lecturers, focus group discussions with first-year students, and analysis of institutional documents. Thematic analysis revealed that academic literacy plays a critical role in facilitating epistemic access by enabling students to engage with academic texts, disciplinary discourses, and assessment practices more effectively. The findings further demonstrated that academic literacy contributes significantly to the academic identity formation, confidence, sense of belonging, and participation in disciplinary knowledge communities of students. However, the transformative potential of academic literacy was constrained by the weak integration of literacy programmes into disciplinary curricula, institutional marginalisation of literacy support, limited resources, and dominant monolingual academic practices that disadvantage multilingual students. The study concludes that academic literacy should be repositioned as an institution-wide pedagogical and transformative project rather than a peripheral remedial intervention. The study recommends the integration of discipline-specific literacy practices into curricula, stronger collaboration between literacy practitioners and disciplinary lecturers, and the adoption of inclusive multilingual pedagogies that advance epistemic justice. The study contributes to scholarship on academic literacy by foregrounding the experiences of first-year students in rural South African universities, a context that remains underexplored in higher education research.

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