'Academic literacies approaches to genre'?

Abstract

I provide an overview of approaches to writing referred to as 'academic literacies' building on broader traditions, such as New Literacy Studies, and I draw out the relevance of such traditions for the ways in which lecturers provide support to their students with regard to the writing requirements of the University. I offer three case studies of the application of academic literacies approaches to programmes concerned with supporting student writing, in the UK and the USA. I briefly conclude by asking how far these accounts and this work can be seen to bring together many of the themes raised at SIGET conferences - including academic literacies and its relation to genre theories - and express the hope that it opens up trajectories for future research and collaboration of the kind they were founded to develop.

Letramentos e identidade profissional: reflexões sobre leitura, escrita e subjetividade na universidade

“…Desde as aulas, onde oralmente exige-se domínio de leitura de textos e sucessivas indagações sobre os textos lidos, até as resenhas, relatórios, provas e outros, todos fundamentados teórica e metodologicamente na leitura e na escrita científica. Essas formas de comunicação operam com regras próprias, e configuram os chamados gêneros acadêmicos (Street, 2010), os quais se apresentam como uma nova cultura para os estudantes, a qual ele desconhece.…”

“…Ao aprofundar o debate epistemológico sobre o letramento, o linguista Brian Street propõe ações e reflexões sobre diferentes gêneros acadêmicos no contexto da educação superior a partir de uma visão geral das abordagens da escrita conhecida como "letramentos acadêmicos", construídas sob a luz de tradições mais amplas, como os Novos Estudos de Letramento, que compreendem a leitura e a escrita enquanto práticas sociais, que estão sob influência das relações culturais de poder, as quais possuem efeitos sobre as identidades dos grupos e das comunidades que operam sob tais práticas. (Street, 2010). No caso da educação superior, são as identidades profissionais que estão em jogo, ou seja, que profissionais a universidade pretende formar, e como as práticas de leitura e escrita podem determinar as identidades dos profissionais que forma?…”

When arts meets enterprise: Transdisciplinarity, student identities, and EAP

“…Student-centred ethnographic research adds a greater depth to this, offering a better grasp of the challenges as the students themselves perceive them. Moreover, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary tendencies point up the limitations of a 'conceptualisation of genre in terms of established disciplinary norms for communication, given primarily by the texts written by academics within a disciplinary community' (Street, 2009), since these norms become increasingly under strain. As new or hybrid genres emerge, 'genre knowledge' becomes more problematic if this knowledge is itself ambiguous.…”

“…We argue that transdisciplinary degrees present new challenges for international students in relation to the range of contrasting written assignments required, and their propensity to innovate forms of assessment that destabilize typical genre parameters students may have previously learned. Furthermore, these challenges are closely bound up with issues of identity, a situation on which academic literacies' 'ethnographic lens' (Street, 2009) can shed light, thereby helping EAP lecturers improve the support they provide students.…”

Construcción de la identidad académica a través del inglés como lengua extranjera en alumnos de primero

“…Interrelations among the cited perspectives are made evident by several scholars (among others, Roth and Lee, 2007;Street, 1999, 2009, Lea & Street, 2006, pouring on foundational concepts of developmental psychology and cognition, literacy and rhetorical studies, and cultural anthropology. We'll focus successively on these strands taking into account the flow of similarities among them.…”