The voices of teacher students' in the struggle for academic access: How they reflect on their writing

Language permeates both teaching and learning. It impacts decisively on the quality of the educational experience, becoming either an aid or an obstacle to academic achievement. In a multilingual context such as South Africa, the majority of students are studying to be teachers through the medium of English, which is not their primary language. This paper brings into focus teacher student reflections on their own writing practices at the end of their final year of study at a South African university. It highlights the continuing divide that exists between the very few students, who have effectively mastered academic writing and those (the majority) who continue to experience difficulty with the reading and writing of academic texts. In this paper I look at the challenges facing many final year teacher students, who, in their struggle to master the conventions of the education and subject content discourse community, may find their progress in higher education impeded. I also underscore the very real danger of graduating teachers who are likely to transpose these difficulties into a classroom context and question how they will be able to convey the subject content to learners and successfully meet educational outcomes in schools.