Introduction
Meet the Language Development Group (LDG). Click on a name below to find out more about the staff:
Arlene Archer
Arlene is the co-ordinator of the Writing Centre . She teaches academic writing and communication in a number of contexts, including Engineering and Humanities courses, and is particularly interested in the changing nature of literacy (including multiliteracies) and how diverse students from a range of language, class, cultural and gender identities access disciplinary knowledge. In her PhD, she looked at the relationship between the multimodal representational resources of diverse students and the expectations of the academy.
Moeain Arend
Moeain joined the LDG in 2007 as a permanent member of staff, but has worked in the Writing Centre as a writing consultant from 2004 to 2006. He teaches on the Language in the Humanities and Academic Literacy in the Humanities courses which are designed for first year students.
Bongi Bangeni
Bongi joined the Language Development Group in 2002. She has a Masters degree in Applied Language Studies. Her research interests include English second language writing and identity, multilingual interventions in various learning contexts, as well as the transition from undergraduate to postgraduate studies and the implications of this transition for writing.
Catherine Hutchings
Catherine has worked in the LDG since 2001. Before that she was employed as a consultant in the Writing Centre, where she initiated the internship project. Her interests include those of academic mentoring, dialogical journaling and reflective literacy. Currently she teaches on courses in the Humanities and Commerce faculties. These include the Academic literacy course, 'Language in the Performing Arts' (LiPA) for students in the Performing and Creative Arts and the language and commerce section of the Economics foundation course. Apart from course teaching, she has run workshops on academic writing, thesis and scientific report writing.
Rochelle Kapp
Rochelle Kapp is an Associate Professor in the Language Development Group. She has taught on a range of undergraduate academic literacy courses, as well as on Honours and Masters’ postgraduate courses in the areas of academic literacy, language education and the politics of English. She has engaged in language-related curriculum development and tutor training in a range of departments. She has also played a key role in language planning and language and student-related policy development at UCT.
Mathilde van der Merwe
Mathilde is involved with postgraduate writing development in the quantitative disciplines. She completed her PhD in Genetics in 2010 at the University of Stellenbosch, where she also acted as writing consultant at their language centre’s writing lab.
Gideon Nomdo
Gideon convenes the Language and Communications module attached to the Introductory Economics course in the Commerce faculty, offering language-based support for students on the extended curriculum programme. He is interested in academic literacy, curriculum development, student development, and mentorship. He is the Academic Co-ordinator of the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Programme (MMUF) at UCT. This fellowship is an Equity Development initiative and aims at recruiting highly successful Black students into academia.
Moragh Paxton
Moragh’s teaching, curriculum development and research has been in Commerce, Humanities, Science and Health Sciences. In her PhD she used linguistic and intertextual analysis of student writing as a tool for investigating the intersection of the academic curriculum and student voices in first year economics.
Lucia Thesen
Lucia has been working in academic literacy teaching, research and development since the mid 1980s. She convenes a Masters option on academic literacies in the School of Education, and initiated the Postgraduate Literacies Project, with links across CHED.
Ermien van Pletzen (Co-ordinator of LDG)
Ermien studied English Literature at the University of the Free State, the University of Cape Town and Cambridge University, receiving a PhD at UCT with a thesis on the language of painting in nineteenth-century English fiction. She shifted focus to academic development work in 2000 with an NRF project on student identity and social transformation in English Studies at the University of Stellenbosch. She moved to UCT in 2001, where she ran the Language Development Group’s joint research project on academic literacy, funded by the Spencer Foundation.