ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors highlight one particular problem – the sometimes unclear relationship between theory and research practice in the academic literacies approach – and outlines some of the methodological moves involved in solving the problem. In an ethnographic study of academic literacy practices reported in the journal Studies in Higher Education, Lea and Street reported on research in a number of UK universities. The study skills approach has assumed that literacy is a set of atomized skills which students have to learn and which are transferable to other contexts. The focus is on attempts to ‘fix’ problems with student learning, which are treated as kind of pathology. The theory of language on which it is based emphasizes surface features: grammar and spelling. The authors draw on a corpus of video recordings collected in a two-year research project investigating language and literacy practices in ethnolinguistically diverse classrooms located in London, where more than 300 languages are spoken in schools.
