Academic Literacies in Theory and Practice
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ACADEMIC LITERACIES IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
INTRODUCTION
The term ‘academic literacies’ provides a way of understanding student writing, which highlights the relationship between language and learning in higher education. It draws upon applied linguistics and social anthropology for its theoretical framing and its orientation towards the social, cultural and contextualized nature of writing in the university. The work on academic literacies sits broadly within a body of research called New Literacy Studies (NLS), which takes a social and cultural approach to writing, in contrast to more cognitive perspectives. The use of the plural form, ‘literacies’, signals a concern with literacy as a range of social and cultural practices around reading and writing in particular contexts, rather than individual cognitive activity. Research findings suggest that in order to understand more about student writing it is necessary to start from the position that literacy is not a unitary skill that can be transferred with ease from context to context. The research points to the requirement for students to switch between many different types of written text, as they encounter new modules or courses and the writing demands of different disciplinary genres, departments and academic staff. It has unpacked this diversity primarily through ethnographic-type qualitative case study research, looking at students’ and faculty experiences of writing for assessment, and the gaps between their expectations of the requirements of writing. In foregrounding the relationship between writing and learning, writing is conceptualized in terms of epistemology—rather than cognitive skill—and what counts as knowledge in the different contexts of the academy. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
In universities across the world academics publish books, journal articles and conference papers, while their students spend much of their time completing written assignments for assessment purposes. It is within this context that increased attention has been paid to student writing, in terms of how best to teach it and how best to support it. The longest tradition of student writing support in tertiary education has been in USA with the provision of freshman composition courses. According to Davidson and Tomic (1999) the first of these “began in B. V. Street and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 2: Literacy, 227–238. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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1806, when Harvard established the first Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory” (p. 163). Later, alongside the compulsory freshman writing course, the expansion of US higher education in the 1960s led to the setting up of remedial or basic writing courses, for those students who were not deemed ready for the freshman courses. In tandem with the compulsory requirement for all American university students to follow a freshman writing course came the development of the College Composition movement which was well established from the 19
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