Estudio administrativo

Central to the current research is the three-levelled model (Lea & Street 1998, 1999) that argues that writing is a socially situated activity. This model includes the ‗study skills‘,

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‗socialisation‘ and ‗academic literacies‘ (ACLITS) approaches (cf. Russell et al. 2009).

The key features are briefly illustrated in Table 2.1. Each approach will be explained in turn as a summary of its major features, but not before casting some light on the

relationship between the three perspectives embedded in this model.

Table 2.1 Approaches to student writing in higher education (based on Lea & Street 1998).

Study skills approach Academic socialisation Academic literacies

Student deficit

'fix it';

atomised skills; surface language, grammar, spelling.

Enculturation of students into academic discourse

inducting students into new 'culture'; focus on orientation to learning and interpretation of learning task; homogeneous 'culture', lack of focus on institutional practices; change and power; student writing as transparent medium of representation.

Student's negotiation of conflicting literacy practices

literacy viewed as social practices;

institutions viewed as sites of/constituted in concepts like discourses and power;

variety of communicative repertoires, e.g. genres, fields, disciplines; switching with regard to

linguistic practices, social meanings and identities; student writing as

meaning-making and contested processes.

Lea and Street (1998) noted that these approaches are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they each build upon the previous approach. Accordingly, the academic socialisation perspective incorporates insights developed by the study skills approach; and ACLITS encompasses both of the other models into a broader understanding of student writing. The ACLITS approach draws, therefore, on the insights of the other two models, emphasising the need to gain an understanding of the purposes of writing, of appropriate linguistic and rhetorical resources to express ideas effectively and of the contexts within which texts are constructed and read (Lea & Street 1998; Lea & Stierer 1999). Besides, it developed its own tenets that helped to examine dimensions of

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academic writing which had not been previously investigated, such as power relations between writer and reader, the role of identity in academic writing and disciplinary writing practices (Lea & Street 1998; Lea & Stierer 1999). Thus, ACLITS attempts to move beyond deficit skills models of writing to consider the complexity of written communication in relation to learning (Russell et al. 2009).

The Study Skills Approach

The study skills approach is based on the assumption that mastery of the correct rules of grammar and syntax, as well as attention to punctuation and spelling will improve student competency in academic writing (Lea & Street 1998). This model has reduced literacy to a ―set of atomised skills which students have to learn and which are then transferable to other contexts‖ (ibid. p.158). From this perspective, writing instructors have to teach technical and generic aspects of writing and to remedy writers‘

grammatical and lexical deficiencies. Baynham (2000) notes that students are normally provided with pre-sessional courses or in-sessional courses, often in mixed disciplinary groups, where they are expected to learn core study skills and apply them in their

particular disciplinary context. This model rests on the idea that ―writing development is

considered to be the result of imitating and manipulating models provided by the teacher‖ (Hyland 2003b, p.3).

This perspective is criticised on a number of grounds. Firstly, it addresses language like a transparent medium where the core study skills are transmitted directly to students who have to master them to produce successful academic texts (Lillis 2006). Besides, this approach views writing as an autonomous mechanism, which can function

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independently of particular writers, contexts, readers and is achieved simply by arranging ideas and employing correct forms and models (Hyland 2002).

The Academic Socialisation Approach

The academic socialisation perspective assumes that students need to be acculturated into disciplinary discourses and genres to become successful writers. Tutors‘

responsibility is to make the features of the written genre visible, whilst students must learn them if they want to access the discourse community (Ganobcsik-Williams 2006).

Despite being more sensitive to students as learners and acknowledging the importance of cultural context, the academic socialisation approach is criticised for assuming that institutional practices and genres are relatively stable and that students have simply to learn and reproduce them effortlessly in other settings (Jones et al. 1999). Another caveat is the assumption that writing is a ―transparent medium of representation and so fails to address the deep language, literacy and discourse issues involved in the

institutional production and representation of meaning‖ (Jones et al. 1999, p.xxi). Seen

in this light, disciplinary forms and conventions are considered to be given, rather than constructed and negotiated by writers (Hyland, K. 2002).

The ACLITS Approach

The emerging body of work on ACLITS (Lea 1998; Lea & Street 1998; Jones et al. 1999; Russell et al. 2009) sees writing as a complex, socially-situated set of meaning- making practices. The understanding of which occurs in specific social contexts that value particular genres and conventions. This research also points to the complexity of

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the writing norms and conventions that students need to negotiate to become

accomplished members of the discourse community. It follows that meanings are not simply given by the texts but are created through participation in a particular set of literacy practices (Lea 1998).

Bazerman (1988 cited in Lea 1998) provided a valuable framework for examining how students complete a written text through switching between different literacy practices, using a variety of linguistic resources appropriate to each context and through handling the social meanings and identities that they have to adopt. The framework encompassed the following contexts:

 the object under study,

 the literature of the field,

 the anticipated audience, and

 the author‘s own self.

Lea (1998) argued that students may find it difficult to negotiate the constraints of the object under study, or they may be confused when incorporating the disciplinary knowledge, or they may find that anticipating the audience (the marker) is not an easy task. Finally, students may struggle with constructing their own selves into their writing assignments. Therefore, these contexts highlight the ways in which students need to interact with the construction of disciplinary knowledge, underlining the situated and dialogic nature of writing. This view on the social situatedness of academic writing is consistent with this research framework.

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At this point, I want to emphasise that the ACLITS approach provided valuable analytical tools to examine the complexity of student writing in HE institutions. Importantly, it challenged many commonsense assumptions about what is involved in writing, by raising questions about privileged discourses and aspects such as power relations and identity, which had been previously ignored. Ivanič (2004) argues that this

view of writing as a social practice is a powerful theory of writing, which is becoming increasingly influential in research on student writing. Arguably, it is the best able to take account of the nature of student writing in relation to institutional practices, power relations and identities, which the other two models failed to consider (Russell et al. 2009). Crucially, it provides valuable tools for examining and describing how students learn to write by participating in socially situated literacy events. However, it also has to be acknowledged that it has yet to be fully theorised as a research design (Lillis 2003). Besides, the pedagogical significance of ACLITS is still in its infancy (Russell et al. 2009). I also believe that it is extremely challenging and time consuming to conduct research grounded in the ACLITS approach, as it demands numerous data collection instruments to capture the array of contextual, individual and social factors that come into play and impact on how students understand academic conventions.