Thirty Years of Literacies Testing at the University of Cape Town

In this deeply considered and carefully argued book, Cliff reviews three decades of work into academic literacies testing begun at UCT. His account gives the wider academic community insight into how the testing project evolved at the intersection of localcommitments in South Africa to redress and ensuring epistemological access to higher education (HE), and international trends in sociocultural literacy theory and student support. The book’s central argument is that academic literacy must be approached critically as a set of historically contingent patterns of knowledge construction, language use, and reading and writing. The heart of the book therefore lies in its detailed account of how constructsor models of academic literacy were developed and tests designed, using dynamic testing theory, to measure students’ potentialfor coping with academic literacy, rather than measuring knowledge and literacy they bring from school, given the deeply fractured and inequitable state of South African schooling. The book asks enduring questions about what it means to identify potential and work responsively with diverse student cohorts in changing times

Argument (complex analysis · Critical literacy · Ethnography · Literacy · Reading (process · Redress · Sociocultural evolution · Work (physics · Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies · Professional Masters Programs Analysis · South African History and Culture