My friend and former work colleague Mary Scott, who has died aged 84, was an expert in the field of academic literacies, the study of the skills, knowledge and understanding needed to participate in academic study.
As she revealed in her writing, Mary was dedicated in particular to helping international students succeed while working with a language and an academic culture that is different from their own.
To this end, she established an orientation course (on which I taught) at the Institute of Education (IoE) in London, designed to prepare such students for their postgraduate and doctoral studies.
Mary was also founding director in 1992 of the Centre for Academic Professional Literacies at the IoE. From that position she set up the highly regarded Saturday morning Inter-University Academic Literacies Research Group, an open forum for teachers and researchers from across the UK as well as the US, South Africa and beyond. She ran and chaired this for 15 years, and it became a spearhead for the development of the study of academic literacies.
Mary was born to Thelma (nee Nixon) and Wilfred Scott in King William’s Town (now Qonce) in South Africa, where she went to the local Kingsridge high school for girls. Her academic career began in the early 1960s at Rhodes University in Grahamstown (now Makhanda), where she gained a degree in English literature and Latin, followed by an MA.
She secured her teaching qualification at Cape Town University and taught English literature in South Africa during the late 60s and early 70s, before moving to the UK to follow a course at the IoE, a programme that changed her thinking and laid the ground for her subsequent work.
She stayed in the UK, maintaining her association with the IoE by contributing to its teacher training programme until, around 1990, she taught, then led, the IoE’s English for academic purposes course.
Over the years Mary had a number of papers published, edited various books and was invited to speak at many conferences across the world. In 2013 she completed a PhD at Tilburg University in the Netherlands with a dissertation titled A Chronicle of Learning that was based on her lifetime’s work.
Mary’s popular lunches with colleagues in the Lawton Room – the IoE’s staff dining facility – continued until her retirement in 2015, and were marvellous occasions, filled with learning and good humour.
She is survived by her brother, Donald.
