Thinking about thinking: Integrating self-reflection into an academic literacy course

This paper describes the work done with first year students doing a course in English for Academic Purposes at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. It is concerned with encouraging students to develop meta-cognitive reflective skills as a means to enhancing learning and developing higher order thinking. This work emphasizes the value of promoting reflection in relation to particular and situated learning tasks. By using their own voices in their reflections, students remain grounded in their existing identities and thus more easily make the transition from their everyday language use to the academic languages required at the University. The research also suggests that reflexivity is a developable capacity-the ability to self-reflect is not separate from the process of coming to know and understand.