ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the policies and practices surrounding student admission, support and assessment, as they are based on a monolingual ideology and a deficiency view of non-native speakers of English. It considers recommendations for transformation made by scholars from the fields of academic literacies, multilingualism, critical English for academic purposes (EAP) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). The chapter also discusses the theoretical and practical contribution that ELF can make towards the transformation of higher education language and literacy policies. Academic literacy requires the understanding of the communicative practices of the discourse community and can therefore only be developed within the community and taught by its expert members, i.e. the subject lecturers. However, there is no systematic provision of subject-embedded instruction; on the contrary, subject lecturers tend to be reluctant to deal with academic language and literacy, which they see as the responsibility of staff in the English language unit.
