Global Trends and Values in Education 1 (1) 2020

L1 LITERACY IN KAZAKHSTAN AND ITS EFFECT ON L2 ENGLISH

ACADEMIC LITERACY

Dr. K.K. Dimitriou

KIMEP University, 2 Abay Avenue, Almaty, Kazakhstan
[email protected]

Darina Omurzakova
KIMEP University, 2 Abay Avenue, Almaty, Kazakhstan
[email protected]

Karina Narymbetova
KIMEP University, 2 Abay Avenue, Almaty, Kazakhstan
[email protected]

Conflict of Interest:
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Abstract

As foreign language universities are becoming ever-more common, the issue of second-
language tertiary literacy has come to the forefront. The linguistic demands of such universities on new
students are very challenging. Though freshmen can pass international language exams in English, the
literacy skills that are most important to tertiary success are those developed in their first language.
However, it is becoming more widely known that most Central Asian post-Soviet education systems do
little to develop such literacy. It would be of great interest to understand the experiences of students
who were going through this difficult tertiary literacy process. Our exploratory ethnographic study
investigated students’ linguistic and schooling backgrounds, their development of writing skills, and
their literacy metalanguage, to try and ascertain the effect of their first-language literacy on their
progress. Therefore, we investigated a Foundation level English-language writing class, the experiences
of its teacher, and six of its students, in a Kazakhstan university. Our findings show that literacy
practices in the high schools of Central Asia seem to be deficient both in the quality of literacy teaching
and in the culture of literacy, namely critical thinking and metacognition. These have had demonstrable
effects on students’ literacy acquisition.

Keywords: L1 Literacy, L2-English Academic Literacy, Metalanguage, Argumentation, CEFR.

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Manuscript:

1 Introduction and context

Tertiary education is built upon advanced literacy skills. When these advanced skills

are practiced in an Anglophone university in Central Asia, the language may be foreign, but

the literacy skills may be too abstract. Therefore, it is the role of university literacy teachers to

work on raising students’ standards (Jones, Turner, & Street, 1999). This work can be done

more successfully if students’ literacy foundations are known. That is the purpose of this study,

which tries to explain the relationship between L1 literacy foundations and their effect on L2

tertiary literacy. The authors’ university is an American liberal arts-style college which

conducts most of its lessons in English. It has Foundation- level courses to bring potential

students literacy up to the entry requirements, through a literacy program. It is this program

and its students that are the object of an exploratory ethnographic study of students’ background

and literacy metacognition.

1.1 Literacy and the transition to university

Entry is typically gained to an Anglophone university through the well-known

international examinations, chief of which are IELTS and TOEFL, which test the four skills.

Universities usually enroll those who have reached B1 level on the CEFR scale, the implication

being that such students should be capable of studying in English. Despite the belief that many

universities have in the examinations, these tests are not tests of tertiary literacy and do not

reflect tertiary writing requirements (Ryan & Viete, 2009; Neff, 2013). It is then incumbent

upon an institution to interpret students’ scores and decide for themselves which students they

will accept. Often this means students completing a semester or more of Foundation training.

Being that the test is in a foreign language, their L2, means that their L2-English studies will

mostly be built upon the foundations of their first- language education.

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Naturally, tertiary literacy is considerably more complex than the demands of any high

school program. Nobody arrives at university conversant in Academic English (Bourdieu &

Passeron 1994: 8). Universities take in freshmen, and challenge those students to build up their

writing skills to the required standard. Success at this is made more likely if the students’ high

schools prepared them by laying a foundation of in-depth reading and writing, including source

use (Sharp, 2010; Keck, 2014), and perhaps experience of citation (Friedman, 2019), which

seems to be common in Anglophone education systems. It is unfortunate that some school

systems do not provide such opportunities (Hayes & Introna, 2005).

Indeed, L1 school systems come into focus because of the popularity of Anglophone

universities for L2- English students. It is important to know the degree to which L1 education

can prepare students for university, as regards cognitive ability, abstraction and literacy. One

aspect of it is cultural awareness, which can have an effect on students’ success (Cai & Kunnan,

2019). The L1 cognitive work in high school should develop students’ capabilities with abstract

topics and abstraction (as found in Cummins’ BICS/CALP Quadrant 4 -Roessingh, 2006),

which develop through structured reading, writing and debates about important issues, while

in high school.

Another, even more important aspect is the prior literacy groundwork they bring with

them, as students attempt to learn in another language and education system with its own

cultural history. L2-English students enter this system with a much smaller vocabulary than

native speakers and less experience of English literacy. Therefore, it is important to see what

role literacy background plays in a student’s literacy process at an Anglophone university.

Timm (2008) has found that pre-university literacy in Europe is often lacking in depth, leaving

students deficient in critical thinking skills also (Neff, 2013). Even British high school

graduates, though they are aware of the complexity of university writing, still may lack a sense

for what they are (Andrews, 2010). As a result, they will often use familiar patterns of writing

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from their secondary work (Andrews, Torgerson, Low, McQuinn, & Robinson, 2006 in Neff,

2013).

The utility of L1 literacy skills may be somewhat indirect, as different languages can

have very different rhetorical styles and genres, as has been posited by contrastive rhetoric

(Kaplan, 1966). The foundations are what create the unconscious writing habits and routines

that students use instinctually, when faced with a literacy challenge (Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008).

Nevertheless, students’ literacy foundations could be utilised in the process of mastering L2

academic writing (Kirkpatrick, 2017; Cummins, 2016).

This has hastened the discovery of the role of explicit literacy metacognition in L2

writing (Negretti, 2012). Students are aided by raising their awareness of the genres of English

writing, and their component parts (Wei & Zhang, 2020). An explicit awareness means that

students can, through writing practice, reflect on their own writing and thus write more

independently (Anderson, 2007), which is one goal of the Foundation program at KIMEP.

However, if students don’t have an awareness of, or even experience of literacy in their L1

schooling, then their work of L2 literacy acquisition will be more difficult, and it could even

frustrate any progress.

Issues like these are the reason why L2 students’ literacy processes are so important. It

is clear that their literacy needs are different from those of L1 English students (Hirvela, 2017).

Meanwhile, the literacy expectations for both groups are the same- argumentation, supporting

evidence, an understanding of topic, drawing conclusions.

The needed for writing classes with literacy experts derives partly from the fact that

lecturers do not see literacy as their primary function when teaching (Neff, 2013). Secondly,

the standard teaching materials in language support classes is too general and superficial for

the needs of university students. Thirdly, the writing skills demanded in the standard

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international exams (e.g. IELTS) do not map well onto the literacy required at university (Neff,

2013).

1.2 Studying Tertiary L2-English writing

As academic literacy is communicative writing for an audience, and because the CEFR

(COE, 2001) is a set of standards for communicative language use, Neff (2103) created a set

of descriptors for academic writing. She created a schema of argumentation to the relevant

CEFR levels, B1 to C2. The main components were “claims and supporting evidence, counter-

arguments and qualifiers, and hedging” (Neff, 2013). These could prove valuable not only for

assessment of students’ writing, but also for pedagogy and for creating a syllabus for university

literacy classes.

1.3 The Education System in Kazakhstan

This section will investigate the relevant aspects of the education system in Kazakhstan. The

first indication of a deficiency in education is derived from common international tests that

countries participate in. The first is the PISA 2012 reading test in which Kazakhstani students

faired relatively poorly particularly in reading, between 2009 and 2012 (OECD, 2018). One of

the reasons for this is perhaps due to the centralised education system in the country which

does not allow local initiatives. The pedagogical approach to education, as evidenced by the

Ministry guidelines is competence-based, where outcomes take precedent. This makes for

objective testing that doesn’t leave room for student creativity or expression.

In particular, the literacy foundations are laid out in the Ministry guidelines (NAO, 2015a,

b), in the curriculums for both Russian-language and Kazakh- language schools. They have a

set of Intended Learning Outcomes (ILO) that include creating different types of texts,

synthesizing information from written and oral texts, writing essays, articles, letters, analyzing

and evaluating information, and revising and editing texts. Their ILOs for foreign language

teaching include filling in tables, charts, questionnaires or surveys, describing real or imaginary

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events, writing paragraphs, and texts of various genres, then editing and proofreading of texts.

These curriculums have been judged “excessively theoretical, wide and superficial” by the

OECD (2018).

These goals seem to be worthy, as far as they go. However, schools are forced to make

curriculums work within this framework, taking into consideration their local capabilities. It is

the post-soviet curriculums that Yassukova (2020) blames for most of the deficiencies in

education. However, there are other, more practical factors to consider.

Teachers can often have classes of more than 50 children. The logistics of such a task

make the teacher’s job very difficult, coupled with the great amount of bureaucratic work that

teachers have. Therefore, their testing is very much objective and focused on accuracy, rather

than creative, communicative writing. There is ample anecdotal evidence that schools gave

writing assignments to students, but accepted, or even encouraged, students to cut and paste

items from Internet sources for those assignments. The data from our participants, in this study,

will corroborate much of the information above, as regards the literacy experiences in

Kazakhstani high schools.

The educational environment exists within a societal context. In Kazakhstan, that

societal context is one of the culturally-conditioned authoritative upbringing of children. If one

looks at Hofstede’s (2011) research, Post-soviet cultures, including Kazakhstani culture in

particular can be referred to as a collectivist, large power distance society. In such societies,

opinions are predetermined by the group, and parents or elders teach children obedience.

Subordinates expect to be told what to do, and there is general conformity with the opinions of

the group, and discouragement of behaviour which does not fit the norm. This may be the cause

of the attrition of teenagers’ ability to express their opinion and logically reason it out through

the use of argumentation.

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That societal context does affect the teaching culture. Yassukova (2020), a Russian

psychologist, studied almost 5 000 9th -graders over 2 decades. She claims that the school

curriculum is not capable of building and reinforcing academic types of thinking, such as the

ability to logically systematise information. Such thinking is precisely what would be required

as a foundation for argumentative thinking and writing at university.

2 Materials and Methods

2.1 Objectives

In light of the task of teaching tertiary English literacy to graduates of the

Kazakhstani education system, it is important to verify the role played by the educational

system in students’ literacy development up to and including high school, and also understand

the effect of this development on students’ tertiary literacy and literacy metacognition. As this

had never been done before, we conducted an exploratory ethnographic study of a Foundation

Level A (FA henceforth- the top Foundation level course) course at the authors’ university,

which met daily, over the length of one semester, in 2019, investigating the effect of students’

literacy background on their FA writing and their metacognition.

The first goal was to capture students’ experiences in high school and during the FA

course. This was done through questionnaires from, and interviews of the students. The

questionnaires, on issues of literacy background, were collected in the first weeks of the course,

on Google Forms. These were the basis for the interviews that occurred after the end of the

semester, and which also covered issues of metalanguage awareness. All the interviews were

conducted via Zoom, in English and Russian, by two of the authors, and transcribed and

translated by those same authors. These ethnographic data were triangulated with the teacher’s

journal.

Students’ writing was assessed for aspects of argumentation, at three distinct stages

during their course. During the data collection phase, a quarantine was imposed on the country

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due to the pandemic of COVID-19. That resulted in the Foundation course transferring to the

online mode of teaching and learning. Some writing data was therefore collected during face-

to-face study and other writing data were in electronic format, having been submitted to the

university’s LMS, where students submitted their assignments.

2.2 Participants

Six FA students (out of a class of 14, taught by one author) consented to take part in

the research, five Kazakhstani and one Tajik (five females and one male), all of whom were

first-year students of KIMEP University, in their second semester of an Undergraduate

Foundation course, where their FA course had been preceded by the Foundation B course

(narrative writing). The five Kazakhstani participants represented different parts of the country:

West, East, South and local to Almaty. Their ages at the beginning of the data collection ranged

from 17 to 21. Their academic background included two lyceum graduates (a higher status and

quality than common secondary schools), one of them being the Tajik students, and the rest of

the participants were graduates of common secondary schools. Three students had finished

Kazakh-medium school, two of them were from Russian- medium schools, and one was from

a Tajik-medium school.

2.3 Textual analysis

The argumentation analysis is based on the system created by Neff (2013) with a

few variations designed for the uses of this study, based on the methods of teaching at the

university. Their claim resolution involved their ability to make a claim, as the overall essay

thesis. But for it to be considered resolved, it needed to be coupled with a conclusion and sub-

claims (at the paragraph level). Next, there were two levels of argumentation, pro-con and

argument/counter-argument. The argument/ counterargument structure is the required

university-level argumentation needed for undergraduate studies. Thirdly, there were the

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analytic components of argumentation. Those components were reasons and evidence. The

latter type, cited and sourced evidence, is required for university- level analysis.

3 Results

3.1 Interviews & questionnaires with students

The first issue was the participants’ literacy background in their L1. About half of

the respondents recall writing opinion essays in their L1 that were based on literature readings,

ranging in length from 200 to 1000 words. There are indications that the quality of these tasks

was very low, perhaps having little or no structure, other than a perfunctory introduction and

conclusion, and a middle section, while there was a general allowing of copying from the

Internet. This data show a weak foundation in L1 literacy, both in amount written and depth of

reading analysis.

The group’s L2- English literacy experience varied widely. The majority of respondents

had experience of writing essays in English, in school, though only one (Tajik), had been given

lessons on how to write. The essays tended to be either opinion or narrative essays, with a

similar lack of quality control (no introductions, no topics, copying from the Internet) being

common. Also, all but one of the respondents had participated in private classroom-based

English lessons, outside of school which averaged between two and four hours per week, for

at least one year. These lessons did not add much to the participants’ literacy skills. Indeed, the

reason that these students had attended outside classes is that the English classes at their high

schools were not felt to be sufficient for them to gain a good grasp of English. This data show

a very weak foundation in structured writing, and in holistic literacy including the study of

reading source texts.

Since metacognition of literacy is seen as a necessary component of independent

writing, this issue was also investigated, using prompts to gather participants’ impressions. The

main literacy items recalled by the majority were thesis statements, topic sentences, and the

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use of credible sources. The role of credible sources was very well-understood indeed, as

regards what constituted a credible source, and what its purpose was within the essay. A

sufficient depth of knowledge about the other items was not always evident. The respondents

were able to locate the placement of the thesis statement in the introduction, but only two were

able to recall what the purpose of the thesis statement was, that being to state the writer’s

opinion on the topic of the essay. The function of topic sentences was not well understood, as

only one respondent offered a relevant explanation, but even that understanding was merely

regarding its placement. These data indicate that the participants’ metalanguage was still weak,

even after the semester-long FA course.

The participants’ meta-awareness of their Foundation course was broadly positive.

There was broad awareness of the need for their course, and that its purpose was to improve

their essay literacy for their undergraduate courses that were to follow. The respondents all

tended to have a broad range of thoughts about benefits of, and purposes of the FA course.

However, they all centred around relevant aspects of tertiary literacy, writing essays and the

relevant writing skills, academic language, paraphrasing and structure. Respondents showed

that they understood the difference between their FA writing course and their previous, high

school literacy. The most common benefit of the FA course, vis-à-vis their L1 experience, was

the structure of writing, and the need for an essay introduction with a general topic. The

respondents all found the FA course helpful, since it was preparing them for their later courses,

and the writing skills that they would require. This indicates that the Foundation program was

both beneficial and found to be beneficial by the students.

3.2 Students’ writing

The students' progress in the course was examined through a study of their writing

at three stages in their semester-long course, that correspond roughly to the beginning, middle

and end of the program. The focus of the analysis was on the construction of argumentation, as

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this is the type of writing that is required in Anglophone university Humanities and Social

Science courses. We used a variation on Neff's (2013) argumentation analysis.

In the first analysis (Table 1), we looked at students' production of the main claim,

or thesis of an essay, and whether it was clear, and coupled with a clear conclusion and sub-

claims. In the first stage, the students had only written an elaborated paragraph, and thus their

writing had a thesis and a conclusion, but lacked sub-claims at the paragraph level (0%). At the

second stage, most of the participants were able to produce a complete argumentation structure

(80%). By the final stage, all the writers had apparently acquired this aspect of writing (100%).

This indicates that the participants were able to develop this structure through the support given

during their course.

The second element of the analysis (Table 1) was the use of complex argumentation

in the macro structure of the text, and within paragraph structures. This aspect refers to whether

students can balance an argument between two competing claims (Reid, 1999), of which there

are two types. At stage 1, the simple presentation of a pro and con argument, with no

argumentation, was not evident at all (0%). By stages two and three, they students had become

quite proficient at this type of writing (100% and 80% respectively).

Table 1 Argumentation components (n=5)

Regarding the argument/ counter-argument type of writing, there was little evidence

visible from their writing. At stages one and two, there were no examples. By stage three, one

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student was capable of presenting two conflicting claims successfully, and choosing and

supporting one of the claims.

The third element, that of analysis (Table 2), was indicated by the use of reasoning and

evidence within argumentative paragraph structures. Again, there were two levels of capability

discerned. As regards reasoning, or presenting reasons for a sub-claim at the paragraph level,

there was ample proof. From stage 1, all participants could produce effective reasons for their

claims. When it came to supporting sub-claims at the paragraph level, there was no evidence

of this, at stage one (0%). However, by stages two and three, there was complete coverage

(100%). This means that the participants had learned the basic rhetorical structuring of an

argumentative paragraph.

Table 2 Analysis components (n=5)

The next level of analysis that was expected was the development of evidence from a

credible source, which also means being able to refer to and cite the author. However, at none

of the stages in this study were the respondents able to support their claims or subclaims with

sourced evidence. Unfortunately, this type of writing is the required university- level analysis

that Foundation students aim for.

In summary, we can see how the students advanced during the FA course. Their

process of acquiring the capability to write sourced argumentative texts was progressing well.

The stages of development were clearly visible from the data presented. The next section will

describe the process, qualitatively, from the teacher’s perspective. There is expression of

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progress, deficiencies and difficulties found during the teaching process. The teacher's journal

was the source for this perspective.

3.3 Teacher’s journal

The first issue is the students' reading skills. While, the students were able to find

direct factual information in reading texts, they had difficulty in discerning the argumentative

function of the information they had found. More specifically, students had substantial

difficulty in defining the main idea and differentiating the details which refer to, or support, the

main idea, in the form of secondary details.

Another issue in reading is students' ability to distinguish the factual value of items

they read. In general, the majority of students usually could not initially distinguish between

fact and opinion when they started the semester. This item sometimes required a long learning

process, even weeks of study. This means that they also had difficulty with the structure of an

opinion paragraph, don’t know anything about the terms and had difficulty in giving reasons

to their claims.

There were several issues about teaching writing that the problems of literacy

production were similar to those of literacy recognition, in their reading. Firstly, in writing,

many students were learning about some parts of the essay structure (thesis, claim/argument)

for the first time, during their FA course. However, most of them were aware of the basic

structures of an essay (introduction, main part, conclusion).

Initial knowledge of argumentative paragraphs or essays was minimal. When students

were asked to write an argument, the tendency was to write a narrative about personal life

experiences, or a descriptive generalization about the topic. The only differentiation was those

students who had been preparing for IELTS Writing text were able to imitate the structure of

an argumentative essay, but often lacked sufficient creativity to apply it to content which they

hadn't learned to write previously.

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At the level of the paragraph, there was a lot of work required for students to learn

the structure an opinion paragraph, which manifested itself in confusion in the distinction

between a paragraph and an essay. In writing the paragraph, students wrote very long examples,

with too many details, or going off-topic.

The next issue was students learning to express and defend their opinions. The class

started writing simple topics, by expressing a plain positive or negative thesis, in the form of

short answers (i.e. yes/no), supporting it with a simple opinion (e.g. “well, I think so”). The

next stage in development is usually making a claim, though they don’t know that such claims

require sourced evidence. As a result, claim structures are taught which force students to create

evidentiary structures, such as “…has three advantages / benefits / pluses.”

There were certain deficiencies visible in the students’ critical thinking faculties.

When the class proceeded to brainstorm arguments (sub-claims) in support of a claim, there

were difficulties. The first of those was in distinguishing between similar ideas. Students often

formulated the same idea in different words and considered them different arguments. One

example was the inability to distinguish between the arguments “animals will suffer” and

“animals feel pain.” There were further problems of finding relevant arguments, and confining

them to a single paragraph.

As the essay writing process was being taught, there were stages in the students'

development. Firstly, there were difficulties in understanding the task, and how it required an

understanding of supporting paragraphs. Students tended to focus on one word in the task (e.g.

advertising), and ignore the role of other aspects. Though students knew introductions and

conclusions well at the beginning, they had difficulty restructuring them to allow for

argumentation. What followed was difficulty in deciding what their opinion was, then allowing

for and explaining an opinion which was opposite to their own, and also critiquing or refuting

that idea.

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Other aspects of their development could be blamed on their lack of a deep culture

of study, and of a shallow understanding of the world. In writing introductions, there was a

need for explaining the general context of the issue. However, this created difficulty that

indicates a lack of reading or short life experience. The last issue was for students to learn the

language of cohesion, to connect the parts of paragraphs into a strong narrative.

The work mentioned above was all part of the process of writing. Students learned by

doing, as a class, in groups, and individually. By the second half of the semester, when the

structures had been practised, most of the students suddenly started to write more

independently. The structured learning of argumentation tended to give students a strong

foundation in literacy.

4 Discussion

The weaknesses of the participants’ L1 (and L2) literacy education was indicated by

their questionnaires and interviews. The lack of depth in their reading and writing was found

to have affected much of their work in the FA course. This is backed up by the PISA findings

(OECD, 2018). First of all, in their reading, it was clear that they could not recognise

arguments, and could not separate facts from opinions. This is fairly common, even within

Europe (Hayes & Introna, 2005; Timm, 2008; Yassukova, 2020). The lack of cultural

awareness which could be used to process cultural issues met in literacy, indicates that it could

affect students’ progress (Cai & Kunnan, 2019). As shall be shown, this has numerous other

knock-on effects in L2 literacy acquisition, as L1 literacy experience could have, if it existed,

been used to aid L2 literacy acquisition (Kirkpatrick, 2017; Cummins, 2016).

Firstly, the participants indicated that they had a weak sense of text structure, having

only a perfunctory knowledge of the three sections of an essay. This could be seen reflected in

the teacher’s claim that students had difficulty differentiating between paragraph and essay

structures. The students lacked an education in text structure, so that there was not even a

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default notion of the paragraph. This is akin to what Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008) noticed, when

they spoke of L1 writing causing automatic routines. In this case, there were no relevant

routines.

Secondly, as found by their teacher, students lacked a sense of a writing task, what

its purpose was, and how to proceed to answer the task. This, being as it is, associated with

many of the other aspects of essay writing, cannot be linked directly to any specific writing

problem, but indirectly, it can be linked to most of the deficiencies seen in their writing. It is a

more severe version of what Andrews (2010) had found in new British tertiary students.

Thirdly, many of the analytical parts of an essay text were missing from the

participants’ background. The first of those was the lack of experience with argument. The

participants claimed to have no experience of using arguments and in formulating a thesis. The

results were likely related to their inability, at their first writing stage, to write a claim.

Furthermore, as a thesis helps structure a text, there is the indication, from the teacher that the

students, when they were told to write an argument, defaulted to writing a narrative text (Jarvis

& Pavlenko, 2008).

Culturally, this lack of ability to argue in writing, seems to fit in with analyses of

Kazakhstani culture and educational culture (Hofstede, 2011; Yassukova, 2020). In a culture,

and school system, where students are taught obedience to subordinates, students are not often

allowed to express their opinions, much less support them. Yassukova (2020) found academic

thinking, which is more general in nature, was not evident in the post-soviet school system.

Fourthly, the absence of critical thinking in participants’ initial writing was evident.

This came in many forms. The writers could not provide evidence to back claims, as

corroborated by the teacher who saw that students could not defend their opinions. In their

reading, the participants could not separate fact from opinion. This indicates that the lack of L1

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literacy has created a general weakness at abstraction (Roessingh, 2006). The participants were

seen to be weak at manipulating abstract ideas like arguments, opinions, and even facts.

Lastly, weak literacy means weak metacognition. If the participants’ L1 literacy

background lacked so many of the building blocks of literacy, there were likely no mental

structures of critical thinking and analysis. This was indicated in the generally weak literacy

metacognition found in the interviews. In such a context, there is no place upon which to build

L2-English tertiary genre description (Wei & Zhang, 2020). In fact, it is the L2-English FA

program which created these mental frameworks of textual knowledge. It is therefore

impressive that the students did recognise the contribution of the FA to creating that

framework.

5 Conclusion & Implications

This is one important study in the understanding of the process of L2 literacy

acquisition in Anglophone tertiary contexts, in countries where English is a foreign language

(Neff, 2013; Anderson, 2007). This study has indicated strong evidence for the importance of

a basic L1 literacy pedagogy for all high school students, and most certainly for strengthening

the role of literacy in university programs. The knowledge economy is not only about

technology, but also the communication of ideas, in an intercultural context. This would be the

practical application of advanced literacy.

The students' literacy processes and the experience of the teacher dovetail well.

Students’ problems with literacy were noticed in their writing, noticed by their teacher during

the process, and were apparently due to students’ literacy backgrounds. That lends weight to

the need for a Foundation program for just such students. Furthermore, this study showed,

particularly through the metalanguage investigation, how students with a deficient literacy

background understand their literacy process, the need for this process, and how they are

taught. This can help a university in improving its processes of course design, to make a more

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successful literacy program, better writing instruction, and students who are more able to write

independently (Anderson, 2007).

This is a new field in Central Asian studies, but KIMEP is not the only Anglophone

university in the area. Further steps in this area of research can be taken by studying literacy

practices in the various types of schools (lyceums, foreign-language schools, private and public

schools) available in Kazakhstan. Testing could also be used to investigate more precisely

students’ literacy capabilities and their metacognitive awareness.

The findings in this study could be used to raise awareness of the deficiencies in public

education as regards literacy, in order to enhance teachers’, principals’, and policymakers’

knowledge about writing. That would include issues like the syllabus, school curriculums, class

sizes, and the training and qualification standards for school teachers, among other topics. Over

the long term, it could indeed lead to dramatic educational change on “both sides of the reform

coin: better teachers and better systems” (Bransford, DarlingHammond, & LePage, 2005, p.

38).

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