Embedding Academic Literacy – A Case Study in Business at UTS:Insearch

Abstract

Academic literacy has become an important issue in Australian higher education as the number of international students has grown. To be academically successful, international students, and for that matter domestic students, require a range of academic literacy skills which are most effectively acquired if they are integrated and embedded within specific disciplinary contexts. This paper presents a case study of embedding academic literacy in subjects in a business diploma, where the embedding involves implementing integrated and shared assessment between an academic literacy subject and two discipline subjects. As well as reporting the outcomes and benefits of this approach, the paper proposes that this integration of assessment extends Dudley-Evans’ (2001) levels of collaborative approach to a fourth level, integrated assessment.