Discursive practices and the teaching of academic writing: notions about writing presented by master students

Abstract

This article investigates the notions about the learning-teaching of academic writing, based on the answers to a questionnaire on this topic presented to a group of master students after they had taken part of an academic writing workshop. The analysis is based on the work of Ivani? (2004) on the discourses about the teaching of writing at school. Through the analysis of the questionnaires we could identify, in the students’ discourse, traces of the genre literacy pedagogy and of a social view of discourse. The results indicate that the workshop contributed to the students’ meta-language in the sense that it familiarized them with a view of writing as a social practice located within specific discursive communities. However, they also indicate that the students are still marginal members of the academic discursive community.