LA INSTITUCIONALIZACION DE LOS PUEBLOS INDIGENAS ESTADO EN EL PROCESO DE REFORMA A LA CONSTITUCION DE LA

Given that students have graduated from high school with the marks necessary to apply for and be accepted to university, tutors and lecturers make assumptions regarding the level of competency of the first-year students. These assumptions are not necessarily valid, and one area of particular concern for those teaching in the first-year course is the actual level of academic literacy exhibited by the students. Without the ability to read and understand the relatively complex setwork texts48 for the course, English 178 students have little hope of being able to articulate their opinions about or analyse the texts.

Levels of literacy also influence students‟ ability to manage their time successfully, as problems with reading and understanding texts will result in students having to spend more time doing so, and less time on the writing tasks. Analysis is also an issue for students who feel poorly prepared for reading. These students will, in all likelihood struggle to model their own academic arguments and analyses of literary texts on the examples of literary analysis provided to them by lecturers and tutors.

From the survey data it is clear that the basic reading or academic literacy skills of the 2011 English 178 class is not a major problem in the eyes of the students. Of the 679 students who responded to the question relating to students‟ perception of their preparedness for

48 _{In 2011 the students were expected to read a collection of short stories, a poetry collection, two plays, namely:}

Master Harold and the Boys and Much Ado about Nothing; two novels, namely: Nervous Conditions and Jane Eyre; and read a minimum of two secondary readings for each longer text, including secondary readings for the

“reading and understanding [the primary] literary texts”, only 52 students, or just less than 8% (Figure A.2.19), rated their preparedness as “poor” (Survey Questions 9 – 25). This, interestingly enough, is very close to the failure rate for the course which was 7% in 2011 (Figure A.2.5). One can only speculate at the link between the two figures, but it seems unlikely that students who perceive themselves to be poorly prepared for reading the primary texts will be confident of their ability perform other more complex skills –such as reading the secondary texts (which more students reported struggling with). This indicates that students perceive secondary texts to be harder to grasp. This would also apply to the writing of academic essays, which a great number of students also report feeling poorly prepared for. It seems logical, then, that the 8% of students who feel poorly prepared for reading the primary texts will experience significant problems with the aspects of English 178 that their classmates perceive to be more challenging. As the surveys were anonymous it is not possible to identify and speak to the students concerned. However tutors, who teach small groups of students relatively intensively for an entire semester, can use their knowledge of individual students to make an informed decision as to who are most likely to struggle with academic literacy. Identifying these students is therefore not in itself a problem, and the tutors encourage these students to make use of the additional academic support. A problem with the current academic support structures in place within the course is that none deal specifically with reading skills. This also raises the question whether or not reading skills should be explicitly taught at university level. Within the English undergraduate course the skills required to read secondary sources are (arguably implicitly) taught, through the gradual increase in the complexity of required readings over the course of the undergraduate programme. No explicit teaching is focused on reading, as most lecturers probably expect students to come to university with the necessary reading skills in place.

Fortunately the majority of students (442 or 65%) (Figure A.2.19) feel well prepared for reading the primary literary texts, though the numbers drop steadily over the next three questions, which relate to the students‟ perceptions of preparedness for “reading secondary critical sources”, “reading the volume of texts […] expected for English 178”, and “completing the required reading[s] for English 178” (Survey Questions 11 & 21).

For the majority of students one of the clearest problems, emerging from the survey data, seems not to be one of understanding the primary texts but one of finding the time (or perhaps the will) to read them completely. According to their responses to the question of

how many of the primary texts they had read in their entirety, the student feedback gathered by the survey appears unrealistic, when compared to anecdotal evidence from tutors. In response to the above-mentioned question the majority of students (261 or 38%), indicated that they read 80% of the required texts (Figure A.2.44). The data from their answers indicates that 20% of the 2011 English 178 class claimed to have read all the texts fully, 38% claimed to have read 80% of the texts fully, 25% claim to have read half the texts fully, 10% only read one third of the texts fully and 4% read “almost none” of the texts (Survey Question 53).

From these figures it would appear that 58% of the students should have a fairly good grasp of the primary texts. However, these statistics are slightly misleading because it is very likely that the 20% of the texts not read by the group of students claiming to have read 80% of the texts, included the two novels (Jane Eyre and Nervous Conditions). These are arguably the most important texts for the students to read fully, yet anecdotal evidence from conversations with other tutors indicates that they are the texts least likely to be read by the students. This is an issue which the department is aware of, and fellow Masters student Jolette Roodt49 is currently working on projects to improve the enthusiasm of students for Victorian literary studies.

Future interventions aside, in 2011 this inability of students to finish reading the novels is concerning. Perhaps it is indicative of the waning popularity of novels from the „Western canon‟ and/or African novels dealing with colonial and post-colonial issues. Reading as a pastime is possibly not under as great a threat, but how one would convert the enthusiasm surrounding a pulp fiction novel like Fifty Shades of Grey to a text like Jane Eyre is a difficult question.

So while student enthusiasm for the choice of prescribed texts undoubtedly has an impact on the number of students who read every book from cover to cover, whether be it a play, short story collection, poetry anthology or novel, one must also consider the issue of preparedness for reading longer or more complex texts. Many students mention how they struggle with “Shakespearian words” (Qualitative Survey Data 30), or with being able “to

49 _{Miss Roodt‟s research towards her MA should also prove very interesting to the readers of this thesis.} Unfortunately at the time of writing her data had not yet been collected, but from the survey questions I anticipate it will yield results which will corroborate the data from the 2011 survey. Part of Miss Roodt‟s survey addressed to what extent students read individual texts and this data would have been particularly useful here.

read and interpret Shakespeare on [their] own” (Qualitative Survey Data 31). Some students also mention that while they “read very often and so [are…] well prepared in that area, [understanding] poetry however [was] not a strong point” (Qualitative Survey Data 17). This indicates that many of the students seem to be lacking in willingness and/or ability to engage with non-contemporary texts and poetry, which points to the type of texts they are familiar with and could explain why the relatively complex English 178 setworks are perceived to be difficult to read by some students. For them it could be a case of almost complete unfamiliarity with the language, as the differences in language complexity between Nervous

Conditions and Jane Eyre are arguably smaller (despite the almost 150 years between them),

than the differences between Nervous Conditions and currently popular fiction like The

Twilight or Fifty Shades series.

Returning to the discussion on student preparedness for reading, the discrepancy between the number of students who feel prepared to read (the 65% who indicated as much in response to survey question 9) and actual number who read a decent portion of the primary texts (58%) indicates that although many students feel well enough prepared to read, some still fail to complete the required reading. This could be an issue of slow reading, though there is no evidence in the interviews or written responses to the survey to support this. Therefore the question must be raised of whether it is a time management problem rather than a reading problem.

Time management of reading appears to be a problem that a number of students are willing to admit to, with one student stating that school failed to prepare him/her for “the amount of reading required” by the course (Qualitative Survey Data 31). In fact only 35% of the students responding to the survey reported being “well prepared” to read the volume of set work texts prescribed in English 178 (Figure A.2.31). A further 39% reported themselves to have neutral feelings about their preparedness, while the remaining 26% declared themselves to be poorly prepared for reading the required number of set work texts.

This question relates not only to the primary texts but also the required secondary texts, which are usually literary criticism written about the primary text. These texts are perceived as being more difficult to read and therefore the students take longer to read and understand them. This change in their perception of the difficulty or degree of preparedness

required for reading the secondary sources is indicated by fact that significantly more students reported struggling with secondary sources than they did with primary texts.

The number of students who admit to struggling with reading the secondary sources doubles, from the 8% who reported problems with the primary texts, to 17% (Figure A.2.20). This increase can be put down to the fact that many of the students are encountering secondary sources for the first time in their first year of university studies. Again there is limited evidence to prove this from the research findings, but it seems likely that the register and language used in the more theoretical secondary sources is challenging, especially at first, for many students.

Returning to the issue of completing the required reading; 21% (Figure A.2.30) of the survey respondents reported that they were “poorly” prepared for “reading the volume of texts […they were] expected to for English 178” (Survey Question 11). In addition to this 26% (Figure A.2.31) reported being poorly prepared to “complete the required reading for English 178”. The difference between these questions may seem subtle but 30 more students felt that they were poorly prepared to complete the readings than those who felt unprepared for the volume of readings. This could be because while the volume of readings was daunting to many, actually completing a novel or secondary text proved to be a more difficult task for many students. That is to say that more students felt able to read the texts if there were no time constraints, but in reality completing the set-work reading was affected greatly by time restrictions.

The time restrictions can be broadly divided into restrictions within the course itself, and external restrictions. It could be that students are unprepared for the demands university makes on their time as first-year students. Their other subjects and/or extra-curricular activities may curtail their ability to complete the required reading for English 178. This would of course vary significantly from student to student and course to course. It seems, though, that many students are “subject savvy”50 from very early on in their university careers. The other explanation is that the English 178 course itself is too demanding in terms of the reading it requires, an opinion voiced by students in the student interviews. Some of

50 _{Some students cultivate the ability to determine fairly accurately how much work is required to pass a subject.} In the best cases this means they can focus their attention on their intended majors, while in the worst it means they can pass their degrees by putting in the least possible amount of effort.

the students in the interview claimed that English 178 “took way more time” than their other subjects, with the main reason for this given as “daai vet boeke51” (Interview 4: Students).

The „thickness‟ of the texts on their own is only part of the problem, as this is compounded by the fact that a new text is dealt with every four weeks or so. In 2011 this was a particular issue as Jane Eyre followed Much Ado about Nothing. This sequence provided the students with limited time to read both texts during the academic term, as calls for students to read over the mid-year break by and large appeared to fall on deaf ears. To combat this issue and to allow for more lecture time for Jane Eyre in 2012, the module was swapped in the schedule with The Truman Show module. Thus in 2012 Jane Eyre will be taught last, leaving six teaching weeks to discuss/teach the novel. It remains to be seen if this will significantly improve the numbers of students who read the text52.

With regard to the completion of required reading, both in the “reading” and “time management” subsections, the survey data indicates that at least 26% of the first-year class was poorly prepared for at least one of the semester tests or essays. Not having read the primary text, from cover to cover, should surely leave a student unprepared to write a test or essay on that text. One would expect then that students would as a result perceive themselves to be poorly prepared for “articulation” and “analysis”. However, this does not seem to be the case, as only the “perception of preparedness to write an academic essay” question elicited a greater percentage of students willing to rate their level of preparedness as “poor”. What makes this more interesting is that tutors and lecturers indicate “analysis” and “articulation” as major areas of concern when discussing student preparedness. This indicates a divergence between students and the lecturers in the English 178 course with regard to what constitutes preparedness. The fact that the failure rate was significantly lower than the 26% of students who felt they were poorly prepared to complete the required reading for the course shows that students do not need to read all the texts to pass the course. Even if one includes the students who deregistered or were declared “incomplete” before the November examination53, the number of students hypothetically failing the course would be 137 (57 of the incomplete and

51 _{Translation: Those fat books.}

52 _{Miss Roodt‟s thesis could be particularly revealing in this regard.}

53 _{These students were not surveyed so their perceptions can only be speculated about, but it is none the less} interesting to note their performance in the course at the point of exclusion (Figure A.2.41).

deregistered students had an average below 50% at the point they left the course). This means that in the worst-case scenario the failure rate for English 178 in 2011 would have been around 11%. The significant difference between the hypothetical failure rate and the percentage of students struggling to complete the required readings suggests that perhaps many students are more “subject savvy” than they are “prepared”, as lecturers would define this.