Note: This is the paperback edition of a previously announced book.

"This book is a stimulating collection of research-based papers that focus on academic literacy work in a particular setting—a South African university ten years after the democratic elections of 1994. The contributors identify and analyse issues emerging from their teaching and integral to students’ creation and recreation of texts in the ‘real world’ setting of the University of Cape Town. Together the papers form a carefully worked tapestry in which ‘place’ and ‘space’, 'boundaries’ and 'boundary crossing’ are threads that signify both change and continuities in the history and politics shaping the evolving identities of students, teachers and the institution… In the issues it raises and the questions it can provoke this is a book of potential value to every teacher and administrator in higher education…" -English Academy Review

"[C]hapters offer future directions for both research and pedagogy… readers would be foolish to ignore the relevance of this book to fundamental questions about the function and goals of higher education globally." -Journal of Sociolinguistics

This book is an analysis of student literacy in an academic setting, and how this has changed due to political, economic and social factors. The contributors, who are all engaged in academic literacy work at a South African university, use the theoretical tradition of New Literacy Studies as developed by theorists such as James Gee, Brian Street and Günther Kress, and apply this to a case study of one university in the changing context of South Africa.

The context demands an extension of this theory in new directions, as the theoretical assumptions governing Anglophone, 'mainstream' traditions may limit insights into academic literacy settings on the margins of these traditions. The book probes some of these limitations by looking at the complex interactions taking place between students' diverse language and educational histories, their literacy practices, institutional discourses, and the many modes involved in engaging with texts. Language is central to all these interactions, and the book considers how they reflect or potentially change the institution.