Voices, Discourse, and Transition: In Search of New Categories in EAP

In this article, the author argues that educators need to expand the repertoire of identity categories by which they describe and explain the complex and often contradictory stances that students take in the acquisition of academic literacy. This position is based on an analysis of biographical interviews with 1st‐year students in a South African university in a period of intense sociopolitical flux. The interviews depict the interaction of a wide range of discourses, both those from past out‐of‐school contexts in which students were engaged and new university‐based ones. These interviews challenge the author to examine the discrepancy between the conventional categories by which students are identified and the way students describe themselves. She argues that this gap is in part sustained by critical literacy/discourse theory, which fails to attend adequately to the agency of individuals and the way they locate themselves in relation to discourses. It also assumes a coherent version of the “mainstream” to which students aspire, which is not borne out in the interviews. She concludes that it is important not to neglect the acting, reasoning individual if the range of identity markers is to be broadened in a joint process with students.