Thirty Years Of Literacies Testing At The University Of Cape Town

Information literacy has been identified as a necessary skill for life, work and citizenship - as well as for academic study - for all of us living in today's information society. This international collection brings together practitioner and research papers from all sectors of information work. It includes case studies and good practice guides, including how librarians and information workers can facilitate information literacy from pre-school children to established researchers, digital literacy and information literacy for citizens.

Tertiary institutions must provide for an increasingly diverse student population, many of whom speak English as an additional language, a nd have attended seriously under-resourced schools. The scale of the problem has necessitated the development of creative ways of ensuring access and successful outcomes. This book covers a diverse range of topics from language policy and academic literacy practices within the curriculum, to evaluation and assessment.

South African universities face major challenges in meeting the needs of their students in the area of academic language and literacy. The dominant medium of instruction in the universities is English and, to a much lesser extent, Afrikaans, but only a minority of the national population are native speakers of these languages. Nine other languages can be media of instruction in schools, which makes the transition to tertiary education difficult enough in itself for students from these schools. The focus of this book is on procedures for assessing the academic language and literacy levels and needs of students, not in order to exclude students from higher education but rather to identify those who would benefit from further development of their ability in order to undertake their degree studies successfully. The volume also aims to bring the innovative solutions designed by South African educators to a wider international audience.

These Proceedings represent the work of contributors to the 14th European Conference on e-Learning, ECEL 2015, hosted this year by the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK on 29-30 October 2015. The Conference and Programme Co-Chairs are Pro-fessor Amanda Jefferies and Dr Marija Cubric, both from the University of Hertfordshire. The conference will be opened with a keynote address by Professor Patrick McAndrew, Director, Institute of Educational Tech-nology, Open University, UK with a talk on "Innovating for learning: designing for the future of education." On the second day the keynote will be delivered by Professor John Traxler, University of Wolverhampton, UK on the subject of "Mobile Learning - No Longer Just e-Learning with Mobiles." ECEL provides a valuable platform for individuals to present their research findings, display their work in progress and discuss conceptual advances in many different branches of e-Learning. At the same time, it provides an important opportunity for members of the EL community to come together with peers, share knowledge and exchange ideas. With an initial submission of 169 abstracts, after the double blind, peer review process there are 86 academic papers,16 Phd Papers, 5 Work in Progress papers and 1 non academic papers in these Conference Proceedings. These papers reflect the truly global nature of research in the area with contributions from Algeria, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Botswana, Canada, Chile, Cov-entry, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, England, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Kazakhstan, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Portugal, Republic of Kazakhstan, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Uganda, UK, United Arab Emirates, UK and USA, Zimbabwe. A selection of papers - those agreed by a panel of reviewers and the editor will be published in a special conference edition of the EJEL (Electronic Journal of e-Learning www.ejel.org ).

Through probing analyses of research, policy, and practice, the book argues that improving the teaching, learning, and assessment of early grade literacy is key not only to expanding quality, access, and equity of education, but also to unlocking all the other SDGs, and ultimately to driving development.