Abstract:
During recent years the reading and writing of literacy self-narratives has received renewed attention in Higher Education.
Of particular interest are the ways in which these narratives reflect the literacy identities that students construe for
themselves and significant others, and how this knowledge may assist lecturers of academic literacy in curriculum reform. This
contribution reports on research that was aimed at exploring the roles that Afrikaans mother-tongue first-year BEd students
construe for significant others in terms of their support or suppression of literacy development. The New Literacies served as
a theoretical vantage point for the pedagogy of the module in question, whereas a model combining insights from the New
Literacies and Self-determination Theory was used to analyse 15 narratives qualitatively. A main finding is that the
students demonstrate a strong need to feel competent at performing literacy activities, and that teachers are the primary
sponsors of such feelings. Parents and other primary caregivers are the second most salient category of significant others who
contribute feelings of competence. Parents’ influence start in early childhood, when they initiate early literacy acitivies with
their children. These activities create feelings of relatedness, leading to the development of feelings of mastery in the children,
and then later in the school career culminate in autonomous literacy-acquisition behaviours. The article is concluded by
suggestions to lecturers on how to enhance students’ feelings of competence through classroom interaction and classroom
activities.
