Keywords

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 toward 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.

Early Developments

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 the USA with the provision of freshman composition courses. According to Davidson and Tomic (1999), the first of these “began in 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 1960s in the USA, as practitioners, who were responsible for teaching these courses, also theorized their work in publications concerned with teaching writing (cf. Bartholomae 1986; Bizzell 1982). However, in the UK and other countries with similar educational traditions, there was little systematic attention paid to student writing in higher education before the mid‐1980s (Ivanič and Lea 2006).

Present-day orientations toward theorizing academic literacies have their roots, in part, in the work which was carried out by practitioners supporting student writers in the USA in the early 1980s. At this time, a new direction had begun to emerge in the US literature which raised questions about the nature of academic discourse. This was informed by work in linguistics and literary theory and contrasted with the more cognitive and psychological models of the individual learner which had come to dominate writing research. Bizzell (1982), for example, critiqued what she termed the “inner‐directed theorists,” who were primarily concerned with the context‐free cognitive workings of the individual mind. She contrasted their approach to writing with the “outer‐directed theorists,” who, she suggested, were concerned with the social context of writing, and in particular with the influence of discourse communities in the use of language. She argued that the focus for student writers should be on discourse communities and the requirement to address their conventions; the task of freshman composition and basic writing teachers was to introduce students to academic discourse conventions.

Bartholomae (1986) also called for a social view of writing . He, too, was situated in the freshman composition context and concerned with basic writers and the ways in which inexperienced, novice writers wrote themselves into academic discourse and the different disciplinary conventions of the university. Coming from an English and humanities tradition, Bartholomae (op.cit) saw writing as both a social and political act, whereby students had to appropriate a specialized discourse; in Bartholomae’s view, this was often a matter of imitation. Both Bizzell (1982) and Bartholomae were concerned with finding ways in which the student could be acculturated as smoothly as possible into both the broader discourse of the academy and the specific discourse conventions of particular disciplines.

At the same time that writers in the USA were focusing on the ways in which students could be helped to learn the conventions of academic discourse, similar approaches were also being taken by Ballard and Clanchy (1988) in Australia and by Hounsell (1988) in the UK. These authors came from rather different disciplinary traditions, and in contrast to the US writers, they were not directly concerned with “basic writers” or remedial writing classes. Their research was carried out with standard entrant 18‐year‐old students in traditional universities. Ballard and Clanchy adopted an anthropological approach in considering the issue of literacy in the university; their focus was upon the relationship between language and culture as a way of understanding more about literacy. Although situating their work within a rather different intellectual tradition from Bizzell (1982) or Bartholomae (1985), the arguments they rehearsed were remarkably similar to the US‐based authors. That is, students lacked the experience and understanding of the linguistic traditions and conventions of higher education, and they needed to be taught how to “read the culture” (Ballard and Clanchy 1988, p. 11). They argued that if academics made the culture and its implicit ground rules of disciplinary writing explicit and accessible, students could grasp the way a discipline worked, and surface problems in their writing would disappear.

In the UK, Hounsell (1988) was one of the first to look in depth at the problems students encountered when confronted with the unfamiliar discourses of the university. He identified academic discourse rather than literacy as “a particular kind of written world, with a tacit set of conventions, or ‘code’, of its own.” In common with Ballard and Clanchy (1988), he also conceptualized this code as “crackable.” He illustrated how students need to be sensitive to different disciplinary ways of framing in their writing and highlighted the tacit nature of academic discourse calling for the features of academic discourse to be made more explicit to students. Although in many ways this work was the forerunner of “academic literacies” research, it can be critiqued for its lack of attention both to the ways in which language is specifically implicated in the learning process and to deeper epistemological issues concerning the ways in which writing constructs disciplinary bodies of knowledge.

Major Contributions

New Literacy Studies

Against this backdrop, a new body of work began to emerge. This offered a different explanation of students’ struggles with writing and meaning making, which went further than the problems of acculturation into disciplinary discourse – as evidenced in the work described earlier – and explored the nature of power and authority in student writing (Ivanič 1998; Lea 1994; Lillis 1997). This particular orientation laid the foundation for the contested approach which has become the hallmark of academic literacies research during the last decade. In 1996, Street published an innovative chapter on academic literacies which both challenged academic convention (by incorporating the original texts of others) and foregrounded questions of “academic literacy.” The perspective taken by Street (1996) in this publication sat within a body of work which had become known as the “New Literacy Studies.” Street’s seminal contribution to NLS had been made earlier when he distinguished between autonomous and ideological models of literacy (Street 1984). He had argued that whereas an autonomous model of literacy suggests that literacy is a decontextualized skill, which once learned can be transferred with ease from one context to another, the ideological model highlights the contextual and social nature of literacy practices and the relationships of power and authority which are implicit in any literacy event. Literacy, then, is not something which once acquired can be effortlessly applied to any context requiring mastery of the written word. Writing and reading practices are deeply social activities; familiarity with and understanding these practices takes place in specific social contexts, which are overlaid with ideological complexities, for example, with regard to the different values placed on particular kinds of written texts. Following this perspective, NLS, with its roots in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, conceptualizes writing and reading as contextualized social practices.

Challenge to Deficit Models of Student Writing

Until the mid‐1990s, this body of research had been concerned with school‐based, community, and work‐place literacies but had not paid any attention to literacies in the university. Academic researchers had concentrated in exploring other contexts for research purposes, rather than the university context within which they themselves were situated. Although early work by both Lea (1994) and Lillis (1997) had conceptualized writing as a contextualized social practice and had explicitly challenged deficit models of writing, neither situated their work explicitly in the NLS tradition nor made reference to “academic literacies” as such. However, Lea (1994) did illustrate the multiplicity of discourses in the academy, an important distinction from the use of the term discourse in the singular. Ivanič also foregrounded the use of different and competing discourses in her study of mature students (Ivanič 1998). Overall, what characterized this emerging body of work on student writing was its specific focus on writing as a social practice and recognition of the multiplicity of practices, whether these were conceptualized as discourses or literacies. The use of the term “literacies,” rather than “discourses” (the framing provided by US writers), gradually became more prevalent in the literature. This was not merely because of its association with a theoretical framing provided by NLS, but because the focus of concern was student writing, rather than spoken language – the term discourse being associated more commonly with the use of spoken rather than written language.

Research by Lea and Street (1998) introduced new theoretical frames to a field which was, at the time in the UK, still predominantly influenced by psychological accounts of student learning. Rather than frame their work in terms of “good” and “poor” writing, they suggested that there was a need to focus on understandings of faculty and students without making any judgments about which practices were deemed most appropriate. They examined student writing against a background of institutional practices, power relations, and identities, with meanings being contested between faculty and students, and an emphasis on the different understandings and interpretations of the writing task. Findings from their research suggest fundamental gaps between students’ and faculty understandings of the requirements of student writing, providing evidence at the level of epistemology, authority, and contestation over knowledge, rather than at the level of technical skill, surface linguistic competence, and cultural assimilation. Based on their analysis of the research data, they explicate three models of student writing: study skills, socialization, and academic literacies. A study skills model is primarily concerned with the surface features of text and is based on the assumption that mastery of the correct rules of grammar and syntax, coupled with attention to punctuation and spelling, ensures student competence in academic writing. An academic socialization model assumes that in order to become successful writers, students need to be acculturated into the discourses and genres of particular disciplines. The third model, which is academic literacies, to some extent subsumes features of the other two and is concerned with issues of meaning making, identity, power, and authority in student writing. These three models and, in particular, the privileging of the academic literacies model have been drawn upon widely in the literature on teaching and learning in higher education, calling for a more in-depth understanding of student writing and its relationship to learning across the academy.

Methodological Considerations

Methodologically, the research uses a mix of approaches for data collection and analysis although these tend to be dominated by ethnographic type and qualitative methods. Research in the field generally draws upon data from a number of different textual sources, frequently using interview transcripts alongside samples of students’ writing and faculty feedback on that writing. Researchers have been particularly influenced by critical linguistics, which is concerned not only with the more obvious surface features of language but with the ways in which texts embed subtle relationships of power and authority. Researchers have found this approach to analysis particularly pertinent when examining how students make meaning in their writing. As a consequence of a methodological approach which focuses in detail on the relationship between texts and practices, ongoing research in the field has been influential in challenging dominant deficit models of student writing in higher education practice (cf. Jones et al. 1999; Lea and Stierer 2000).

To date, much of the research in the field has been carried out among marginal groups of students. In her early work, Lillis (1997) paid particular attention to the implications of the increasing diversity of the student body, exploring the implications of opening up higher education to previously excluded groups, such as mature women and black students. She uses detailed interview and data from students’ essays to explore the ways in which such students make meaning through their academic writing. Methodologically similar perspectives are adopted by Ivanič in her analysis of mature student writers and the distinctions she elaborates between four aspects of writer identity (Ivanič 1998). Lea (1998) takes a similar stance in exploring how students studying at a distance construct knowledge through the texts they read and write. Despite the wide variety of contexts being studied, the findings concerning students’ struggles with writing and the gaps between tutor and students’ expectations and understanding remain remarkably constant. What links research in the field is the attention to the nature of situated practices and their associated written texts.

Work in Progress

Academic literacies research has gone hand in hand with ongoing changes in global higher education, including increased diversity in the student body, the introduction of modular degree programs, moves from traditional academic disciplines to vocational and professional courses, e‐learning, and the globalization of the tertiary sector. These are having profound influences on the kinds of texts that students are being asked to produce for assessment, and more recent research reflects the application of the principles of academic literacies to these changing contexts.

Research in the field has both reflected and illuminated further the changing nature of the context for today’s academic writing. In this respect, authors have begun to address the implications of this research on student writing for educational development in tertiary education more generally (Lea and Stierer 2000). One particularly significant aspect of this approach is related to the ongoing attention being paid in tertiary education to the use of reflective writing, particularly in professional and vocational courses. A number of researchers are examining the nature of the writing that is required in these contexts, both foregrounding and problematizing the relationship between the supposedly self‐evident relationship between reflective practice and reflective writing (Baynham 2000; Creme 2000; Rai 2004; Stierer 2000).

Academic literacies research is also taking place against a backdrop of attention to the changing nature of texts themselves, a change first highlighted by the New London Group and their attention to multiliteracies. Arguing that increasing linguistic and cultural diversity and the multiplicity of channels of communication required new ways of understanding the literacy landscape in education, they suggested that language‐based approaches alone were inadequate for addressing the changing environment. Their work has been taken forward in debates concerned with the nature of multimodal texts (Kress and Leeuwen 2001). Thesen (2001) relates these more general debates on multimodality to the changing nature of higher education. Drawing on data from her research in a South African university, she provides evidence for the shifts that are taking place in the new contexts of higher education, which privilege multimodal texts over the essay. She suggests that these are likely to lead to intense struggles over what counts as powerful knowledge. Although this is a persuasive argument in some contexts, a tension – between the privileging of print and the increased use of multimodal texts – continues to surface, with ongoing claims being made for technologies bringing forth new kinds of literacies in educational contexts, in the face of the ongoing dominance of the authority of the written text in tertiary education (cf. Lea 2004b).

In related debates, Street has critiqued approaches which appeared to align mode with particular types of literacy, for example, the use of terms such as computer literacy and visual literacy, arguing that it is the context rather than the mode which needs to be foregrounded in a social view of literacy (Street 1996). In addressing this relationship further, he uses the term “new communicative order” to describe the complexity of literacy practices which are associated with screen‐based technologies, multimodality, the use of hypertext, and the Web (Street 1998). Snyder (2002) adds to these debates, arguing that being literate involves using different modalities and that the challenge is to consider what technologies mean for educational practices in terms of the broader social, political, cultural, and historical contexts. She suggests that texts are always informed by social and cultural practices and that new types of texts, new language practices, and new social formations will develop as people find new ways of communicating with each other.

Despite these general developments, most of the work on literacies and technologies focus upon school‐based and informal contexts of learning (Lankshear et al. 2000; Snyder 2002) and are not concerned with the contexts of higher education. One exception is a developing body of work which has been taking an academic literacies lens to the texts of online learning. Goodfellow et al. (2004) argue that the texts of computer conference discussion in online courses should be approached as academic writing, embedding relationships of power and authority in much the same way as any other writing in the academy. Despite being virtual environments, students still have to “read off” the ground rules concerning what counts as knowledge, in a context given primarily by the university delivering the course. Goodfellow and Lea foreground the institutional context of virtual learning and the implications for student writing, whether online or offline. This builds upon their earlier research on a global online course, illustrating how students often struggle with, and have little opportunity to challenge, the dominant literacies and discourses embedded in the course design, thus foregrounding the nature of institutional practice (Goodfellow et al. 2001).

The focus on institutional context is particularly significant because the notion of academic literacies as institutional practice has been somewhat lost in the ways in which the literature of the field has been taken up recently, particularly in educational development circles. The importance of institutional context was first raised by Lea and Street (1998), and in separate publications, both the authors have, more recently, returned to this as an essential element of an academic literacies framework (Lea 2004a; Street 2004). Street argues that we need to reconsider the whole notion of the university and the role of writing within that. He proposes a way of linking ideas from what he terms the new orders: that is, the new work order, the new communicative order, and the new epistemological order with academic literacies research.

Problems and Difficulties

Academic literacies research has been highly successful in providing evidence for new approaches to student writing, which challenge more conventional deficit models and highlight the link between student writing and learning. Indeed, Haggis argues that this framing provides an alternative explanation to dominant approaches toward understanding student learning more generally in a mass higher education system (Haggis 2003). However, the major challenge to the field, now, is to find ways of making the research findings relevant and central in pedagogic contexts. In this respect, some authors have raised questions about the relevance of this research to pedagogic practice. Lillis (2003), for example, argues that while “powerful as an oppositional frame, that is as a critique of current conceptualizations and practices of student writing, academic literacies has yet to be developed as a design frame” p. 192. She argues that Bakhtin’s work on dialogism provides an added dimension, providing a focus on dialogue rather than monologue as central to supporting student writing. Lea (2004a) raises concerns about the whole focus of the field upon student writing. She suggests that the “tendency of the research in the field to concentrate on the non‐traditional entrant and her writing, whether in terms of age, gender, race or language, at best might mask the implications of the research more broadly and at worst recreate a deficit model or study skills model.” She proposes a model of course design which is based on the findings from academic literacies research and takes more account of literacies across the university.

At present, therefore, the central body of research continues to be around issues of student writing and the applications of academic literacies as a research model to practice‐based settings. In this respect, Creme and Cowan (2005) report some interesting research findings in a peer assessment project with students. They argue that it is not only academic teaching staff who have implicit models of “good writing.” By the second semester of their first year of study, students, too, seemed to have internalized a view of “the essay” and, in the action research project in question, appeared to be using this tacit knowledge in their response to the work of their peers. Creme and Cowan suggest that their students had already become acculturated, or academically socialized, into institutional ways of talking about essays, that is, they seemed to implicitly “know the rules.” This is a particularly interesting finding because it provides an alternative perspective to the dominant finding of academic literacies research concerning students’ struggles with writing. Creme and Cowan conclude that their students had fairly fixed notions of other students’ writing and suggest that this could form the basis for further exploration about students as both readers and writers. Academic literacies research has focused almost exclusively on writing and has not foregrounded what is to some extent a self‐evident relationship between writing and reading. It may be time to redress this balance.

It is noticeable that the majority of publications in the field draw on research carried out in the UK or countries with similar tertiary education structures, for example, South Africa and Australia. This reflects a troubling reality of research into academic and student writing – its national rather than international orientation. This might well be because research reflects local concerns which are not always understood across cultural divides, particularly when different educational priorities are at stake. We are beginning to see some exception in terms of a related area, the implementation of “writing in the disciplines” programs (Monroe 2002). These foreground learning the discipline through writing and adopt principles which are closely related to the “academic socialization” and “academic literacies” models of student writing. The distinctions and similarities between these two bodies of work remain a fruitful area of collaboration and research, with academic literacies researchers able to offer empirical methods of data collection and analysis which are not generally evident in the literature in writing in the disciplines.

Methodologically, it could also be argued that the field has somewhat neglected social and cultural approaches to learning, which have their roots in disciplinary traditions other than those of social linguistics and anthropology. Lea (2005) has argued that academic literacies researchers should take account of the framing offered by work on communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991), activity theory (Engestrom 1987), and actor‐network theory (Law 1992). All these approaches can provide academic literacies researchers with additional methodological tools when analyzing their research data.

Future Directions

This chapter has highlighted the varied and changing nature of the texts and practices found in academic contexts and the contribution made to our understanding of this from academic literacies research. However, to date, the focus has been primarily on writing. With the changing nature of textual practice in tertiary education, as explored in this chapter, it may now be an opportunity for researchers to pay more explicit attention to reading as part of writing, in both print-based and virtual contexts. This development could be addressed in tandem with another limitation in the field, the lack of longitudinal ethnographic research in specific institutional settings. More research of this kind could provide evidence for comparison and contrast in different disciplinary contexts and take account of the changing status of knowledge, and its associated texts, in today’s global higher education. A substantive body of work of this nature would establish the dominance of the field and its contribution to understanding how the academy of the twenty‐first century is constructed through both its texts and practices.

Cross-References