A first-year university student can read every word on a page and still miss what the author is really saying.
The difficult part is often hidden between the sentences: recognising an implication, connecting ideas that were never stated directly, or working out what a writer expects the reader to understand without explaining it explicitly.
These skills matter enormously at university. A textbook rarely tells students exactly which idea deserves attention. Academic articles assume readers can follow arguments, compare evidence and draw conclusions from information scattered across several paragraphs.
For students entering higher education without those habits firmly established, reading itself can become an academic barrier.
New South African research suggests that barrier is not necessarily permanent.
Researchers Nandi Weder and Ilse Fouché studied 51 first-year students enrolled in an Extended Curriculum Programme (ECP) and found that students who began with the weakest academic-literacy and inferencing abilities made substantial gains after completing a year-long academic-literacy course.
Perhaps most interestingly, some of that improvement occurred in a skill the course was not explicitly designed to teach.
Learning to read what is not written
The study, published in Evaluation and Program Planning, assessed students before and after the academic-literacy intervention.
The researchers were particularly interested in inferencing.
In simple terms, inferencing is what happens when a reader has to combine information in the text with context or existing knowledge to reach a conclusion that the author has not directly stated.
Imagine reading that a student entered an examination room carrying an umbrella while water dripped from their coat. The text does not need to say that it was raining. The reader reaches that conclusion from the available clues.
Academic reading demands the same process at a much more sophisticated level.
Students may need to recognise an author’s underlying argument, understand why one piece of evidence challenges another, or connect ideas introduced several pages apart.
Weder and Fouché tested these abilities before and after the students completed the course. The researchers then compared changes among students who had entered with different levels of academic literacy.
The improvement was not evenly distributed.
Students with the lowest initial scores showed significant gains. Those who entered with the strongest scores improved comparatively little.
That difference may be one of the study’s most useful findings.
The same classroom does not mean the same need
Universities often organise academic support around groups: first-year students attend a course, complete the same activities and move through broadly the same programme.
But students do not necessarily arrive at university needing the same things.
Someone already comfortable with academic reading may gain relatively little from instruction designed to establish foundational literacy. Another student sitting in the same room may be acquiring abilities that fundamentally change how they interact with every other university subject.
The researchers therefore argue for differentiated support, educational interventions that respond more closely to students’ starting capabilities rather than assuming one level of instruction will benefit everyone equally.
That does not necessarily mean separating students permanently according to ability.
It means recognising that equal access to a course is not always the same thing as equal educational need.
An encouraging result for academic support
There is another important detail.
According to the paper’s published highlights, students improved their inferencing ability even though inferencing itself was not explicitly taught during the course.
That suggests academic-literacy development may sometimes transfer beyond the precise skills being practised.
A student who becomes better at examining arguments, navigating complex texts and engaging critically with written material may also become better at drawing the connections those texts require.
The study cannot establish that this will happen across every university, course or student population. It involved only 51 first-year ECP students, and the before-and-after design does not provide the same causal certainty that a large randomised experiment would offer.
The small sample also means caution is needed before generalising the size of the observed gains across South African higher education.
But the direction of the result matters.
A South African education question
Debates about university readiness can easily become debates about what students supposedly lack when they arrive.
This research offers a more constructive way of looking at the problem.
Students who entered with weaker academic-literacy skills were not fixed in that position. Under the conditions examined in this study, they improved, and the students starting furthest behind were the group in which the strongest progress was observed.
That shifts attention from simply identifying educational disadvantage to asking what institutions can do after students arrive.
For universities, the implication is not that every academic-literacy programme will automatically produce the same result.
It is that support can matter, and that its value may be greatest when it is responsive to the students who need it most.
A university entrance mark tells an institution where a student begins.
Education still determines how far that student may be able to move.
Source Information
Study Title: Undergraduates’ academic literacy and comprehension: Changes observed during an intervention
Authors: Nandi Weder and Ilse Fouché
Journal: Evaluation and Program Planning
Volume: 117
Article: 102785
Publication status: Peer-reviewed journal article
Published online: 15 May 2026
Issue date: August 2026
DOI: 10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2026.102785
