The assessment of academic literacy at pre-university level: a comparison of the utility of academic literacy tests and grade 10 Home Language results

[摘要] The definition of academic literacy utilised for this study proposes that thedistinction-making activity accompanying academic discourse constitutes whatmakes academic discourse unique, which at the same time also discloses thatacademic discourse is a distinctive language with its own conditions, different fromother lingual spheres, as opposed to earlier definitions which often took a closedview of language, regarding it as consisting of sound, form and meaning. Aconstruct deriving from such a specific definition of academic discourse thereforeacknowledges the shift in focus of language instruction and assessment brought onby the communicative approach. An academic literacy test designed to establish theacademic literacy levels of prospective tertiary education students should thereforebe aligned with this construct. For this study, two academic literacy tests wereadministered to two groups of Grade 10 students in order to determine howaccurately these tests would disclose the students' levels of ability to handlelanguage for learning. The students' school marks were then compared to the marksreceived for the academic literacy tests. Although the school language markspredicted the general academic performance of the test population more accuratelythan the proposed academic literacy tests, the second test used came close topredicting these levels almost as accurately as the school marks. Read inconjunction with a number of other current studies, this result, however, stillemphasises the significance of and need for well-designed, construct-based andcorrectly pitched (as regards level) academic literacy tests.

[发布机构] University of the Free State