Analysis

In terms of English literary studies “analysis” can be termed a core skill that students are taught to develop. This is often a difficult task and one that students perhaps do not always realise they have not quite grasped. Arguably this is because it is rather tricky to pin down exactly what literary analysis entails. The English Department has no firm definition of the term in their official guidelines, but as I have come to understand it and therefore both taught it and used the term in the surveys, literary analysis is the “formulation [of one‟s] own response” to a literary text (“Course Prospectus” 3). Appropriate literary analysis though requires a “close, interactive reading of texts” both primary and secondary, and the response has to be expressed “clearly and coherently” (“Course Prospectus” 3).

61 _{These quizzes are available online at www.suenglish178.blogspot.com and then clicking on the „Quiz‟ link in} the menu bar.

The student responses to the questions in the analysis subsection of the survey suggest that the majority feel well prepared “to develop a personal interpretation of a text” (Survey Question 16), with 50% of students rating themselves as well prepared, 35% as neutral and only 15% perceiving themselves to be poorly prepared to develop a personal interpretation of a text (Figure A.2.26). It would seem from anecdotal evidence from tutors that this data is an accurate reflection of classroom discussions, but when students are required to put their ideas/interpretations on paper the analysis is less compelling.

This is perhaps because when discussing a text in class, especially in a first-year class of widely varying abilities and levels of interest in the course, it is particularly difficult to go into any significant depth about a single issue within a text. Therefore class discussions tend towards general outlining of issues or themes rather than in-depth oral analysis. Stronger students consequently either already know how to perform a more in-depth analysis of the texts, or learn through trial and error through the course of the year. There is in all likelihood the odd class where a large core group of strong students makes it possible for a tutor to facilitate more comprehensive analysis, but these classes are very definitely out of the ordinary.

Students also find it very difficult to perform analysis on a text they have not encountered before for a test or essay. It seems that South African schools prepare students exceptionally well for working in groups; at best this allows them to bounce ideas off each other, while in the worst-case scenario the weaker students remain passive and leech off the stronger students. As English 178‟s tutorial programme makes extensive use of group work within the tutorial room, students are very comfortable when given a text to puzzle out in groups of 3 to 4. However, when made to work on their own, students are less adept at formulating their own interpretations of a text. This is true in particular for poetry, with numerous students stating that they “struggled at first [with] poetry” or “because [they] had second language at school […they] did not do any poetry” (Interview 4: Students); they therefore found poetry exceptionally difficult. Due to the nature of the longer texts (novels, plays, films and even short stories), students are never exposed to analysing any other form of text on their own. So it is entirely possible that they would struggle as much with the other texts as they do with poems, if they were left to analyse the text completely on their own.

Students‟ perceptions of preparedness for “performing close reading[s]” (Survey Question 17) are slightly worse than their perceptions of being able to develop a personal interpretation of a text. In response to the aforementioned question, 44% rated themselves as well prepared, 39% as neutral and 17% as poorly prepared to perform close readings (Figure A.2.27). The 114 students who ticked the poorly prepared box in response to this question are likely to include most of the 115 students who rated themselves as poorly prepared for the “reading and understanding of secondary critical texts” (Survey Question 10) (Figure A.2.20). One student specifically stated in the Qualitative Survey Responses that school “did not teach [him/her] how to analyse readings” (35), but the lack of other similar responses indicates that close reading is not a key factor in passing English 178. It appears that a broader understanding of the primary text is sufficient. While this it might frustrate lecturers and tutors, it could also go some way to explaining the marks distribution (Figure A.2.12).

Again, the fact that many students state that they were not taught any close reading skills at school could explain why they have trouble with poetry in particular: by its very nature and because there are fewer words on the page, the analysis of poetry has to be more in-depth and this calls for a close reading. It seems then that the students responding as „neutral‟ to this question are probably finding that their ability to perform a close reading is good enough to pass, but as figure A.2.35 shows, the majority of students are more concerned with writing skills and time management issues. This could explain tutors bemoaning receiving eloquently written plot summaries – when the task required students to analyse the extended metaphor of dancing as an ideal for life in Master Harold and the Boys, for example.

The major area of concern in this section on analysis is also the fact that 24% of students responding to the question of how well prepared they felt “to engage secondary readings in [their] interpretation of a text” felt poorly prepared (Survey Question 18). This is superseded only by the number of student reporting themselves as poorly prepared for “writing academic essays” (28%) (Figure A.2.22) and those who felt poorly prepared “to complete the required reading for English 178” (26%) (Figure A.2.31). In addition to the 24% reporting themselves as poorly prepared, 42% responded with „neutral‟ and only 34% responded that they felt well prepared (Figure A.2.28). While it is perhaps a bit much to expect a first-year to attempt a poststructuralist reading of Nervous Conditions, the use of simpler post-colonial theories is encouraged when writing about that text in the course.

Despite the attempts from both the lecturers and the tutors, students remain unwilling to engage with secondary sources, and will only incorporate them in an essay under severe duress.

Even the stronger students seem to struggle with incorporating the ideas of other scholars into their own work62 and anecdotal evidence from discussions with other tutors suggested that 34% feeling “well prepared” might be an over-representation of the actual numbers. This could be because students are unaware of how poor they actually are at incorporating secondary sources into their academic writing. Part of this problem stems from the seeming unwillingness of students to heed feedback from one essay to the next. This is not an issue with drafts and final versions of the same essay, but there appears to be an exceptionally slow learning curve from one assignment to the next. At times one wonders if the students are only checking their mark and paying no further attention to their marked essays. It must be said, however, that lecturers have observed that this slow uptake of comments in written work and in applying insights to subsequent work is a feature of the work of postgraduate students in the discipline as well.

It is not only a problem of incorporating quotations, but of formulating ideas that are the flywheel of an interpretation and the logical linking of ideas. Here is an example from a 2011 English 178 student‟s Jane Eyre essay, reproduced with errors, submitted in September of that year:

According to Mary Wollstonecraft “a slavish bandage to parents‟ cramps every faculty of the mind…this strict hand may in some degree account for the weakness of women…and thus taught slavishly to submit to their parent, they are prepared for the slavery of marriage”, (1792) but because Brought up in this Victorian style, she could perhaps not cope with what as expected of her and this could have led to her breaking down mentally.

(Student Essay)

62 _{There is the odd plagiarism case where a student will attempt to pass off another scholar‟s work as his or her} own, but that is a different matter, although the constant warnings about the punishment for plagiarism offences might serve to dissuade some students from attempting to make use of secondary sources.

With a little knowledge of “first-year speak” one can infer that the student is attempting to explain (with the use of Wollstonecraft‟s quote) why Bertha Mason was driven insane, though this is not immediately clear to an uninformed reader. First-year students often do this, relying on the marker‟s knowledge of the subject matter to fill in the gaps, rather than stating their argument clearly63. This extract illustrates that if the student‟s writing skills are not up to a basic standard, then analysis is almost impossible, and this perhaps is why students are more concerned about their preparedness to write academic essays rather than their preparedness to analyse texts.

This concern is neatly demonstrated by figure A.2.35, where the student responses to the survey question asking them to state “in two sentences […] what [their] pre-university education and life failed to prepare [them] for in terms of English 178” were coded into a graphical representation of these responses. Some students listed two issues while others only listed one, so no percentages can be extrapolated from the graph, but it does provide an indication of the most commonly perceived areas of unpreparedness64.

It is clear that academic writing looms large as an area where students feel they are poorly prepared, with 240 claiming that this was a problem area: they did not feel they came to university equipped with the skills to cope with this requirement (Figure A.2.35). In comparison only 7965 students listed analysis or “the critical analysis of a text” as an area which they felt their pre-university education had not prepared them for (Qualitative Survey Responses 41).

The other area of major concern for students is undoubtedly „Time Management‟, with 166 claiming to be poorly prepared by their “pre-university education and life” for this factor, which was coded as an “extra skill” in the graphic representation the quantitative survey feedback (Figure A.2.35). The step-up to university workload levels seems to catch many students unawares and it is the only subsection of the “Student Preparedness” series of

63 _{Though it must be said, after four years of tutoring and marking first-year essays, one begins to understand} their logic regardless of the sentence formulation.

64 _{Another interesting representation of this feedback is presented on page 300 of the “Qualitative Survey} Responses” data document as a „Word Cloud‟ which gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the student feedback.

questions in the 2011 survey where the „neutral‟ responses outnumber the „well prepared‟ responses.