Abstract:
The paper problematises student writing as social practice from the perspective of
lecturers’ discursive practices. The paper uses data from a major study at a higher
learning institution in Tanzania to explore lecturers’ discursive practices and
familiarity with the university orders of discourse including English medium of
instruction, in unequal power relations with students, for whom English is a foreign
language. The lecturers’ practices are scrutinised in terms of how they work against
facilitating students’ access to the privileged literacy practices of the academia and
how they serve to enact and sustain dominance in Tanzania’s education system, with
its monolingual orientation, which privileges Kiswahili in primary school and
English in secondary and higher education.
