STUDENTS' PERCEPTIONS, ATTITUDES AND UNDERSTANDING OF ACADEMIC LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

ABSTRACT Students are faced with various academic and non-academic challenges when they come to study at universities for the first time. They have to adapt to new ways of learning, new ways of using information and navigation through various academic sources, new ways of reading (critical reading and analysis) academic texts, new environments and also to finding ways to write for academic purposes. Along this journey, they develop perceptions and attitudes towards Academic Literacy (AL) and Higher Education (HE) at large. The study was aimed to investigate students’ perceptions, attitudes and understanding of AL. AL practices such as reading and writing across disciplines, constitute central processes through which students learn new subjects and develop their knowledge about new areas of study (Street, 1998). A qualitative approach was used for this study. One hundred and fifty students from Natural Science Faculty participated in the study. The results of the study indicate a strong need for a student-centred pedagogy to be implemented during the teaching and learning of AL. Keywords: perceptions, pedagogy, linguistic analysis, Higher Education, discipline, student-centredness