Presentation at RWLL Tues 28th Feb 2014
Maria Lucia Castanheira; Gilcinei Carvalho (FAE, UFMG, Brazil)
Brian Street (DEPS, King’s)
Academic Literacies in Brazilian Universities: challenges of teaching
and learning academic genres
In this presentation Gil and Maria Castanheira review some of the complex
changes in student composition at Universities in Brazil and consider the
implications for both tutors and students in engaging with the writing
requirements of the university in that context, signalling some of the
sociolinguistic and literacy issues.
Brian reviews the Aclits perspective as a basis for asking what this can
contribute to our understanding of these issues.
Academic Literacies: Brian Street
An Academic Literacies (AcLits) approach emerged in the UK in the late `90s
as a response to challenges associated with an increasingly diverse student
population and the lack of writing provision offering discipline specific support.
Providing a critique of that complex situation, the AcLits approach defined
academic writing on the level of social practice and highlighted issues of
power, identity and meaning-making as central to academic writing
conventions. In the last two decades the critical stance offered by the AcLits
approach has become widely used as a research frame and as a foundation
for pedagogic initiatives in the UK and more recently also abroad. Brian briefly
signal some of these developments, as reported by Lea and Street
(forthcoming), noting in particular some of the criticisms of the AcLits
approach and also some of the debates with international colleagues.
Lea, M and Street, B (forthcoming) ‘Academic Literacies 15 years on’ In
Theresa Lillis, Mary Lea, Sally Mitchell and Kathy Harrington Working With
Academic Literacies: Research, Theory, Design
Access of students from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds to higher
education in Brazil; Gilcinei Carvalho
Gil discusses how, in the last decade, the access of students from diverse
socio-cultural backgrounds to higher education in Brazil increased as a result
of various State educational policies. This brought new elements to a longstanding challenge to both students and university faculty: the learning and
teaching of particular academic genres produced in the graduate school
context. He reports In particular on the ways in which students from Campo
(rural) and Indigenous backgrounds encounter the academic requirements of
a Brazilian University. He describes some of the writing associated with entry
level and final Reports and, calling on his own research background in
Sociolinguistics, he signals some of the conceptual apparatus that can help us
to analyse these academic literacy practices, including Rhetoric; Genre;
Discourse; Voice, some of which are also addressed in Maria’s presentation.
Students from Angola in a Brazilian University: Maria Castanheira
Maria Castanheira analyses how supervisors have faced the challenge
presented by the arrival of students from Angola, whose Portuguese is
different from that of Brazil, in supporting them to understand the features of
academic genres such as research project and final reports of masters or
doctoral researches. She presents research data from various sources:
supervisors’ feedback to students, interviews with students and supervisors,
The analysis draws on concepts in the social linguistic and literacy fields,
including lexical choice, idiom and voice. She emphasises the importance of
examining how university supervisors help students to understand the
situated nature of academic writing, and what is involved in them becoming
researchers.
Discussion:
We conclude by considering ways in which the Academic Literacies approach,
in relation to concepts from the fields of Sociolinguistics and Literacy as Social
Practice, can help us to understand expectations about students’ writing
practices at university, including the importance of supervisor/student
relations in text production, within the changing educational context.