Academic literacy: theoretical and practical perspectives in a textual reading and production class

Abstract

Anchored in the New Literacy Studies and also based on an ethnographic research, Lea and Street (2014) established three models that allow the study of reading and writing practices at the university: i) that of skills, ii) that of socialization and iii) that of academic literacy as a social practice. Taking this proposal into account, the objective of this investigation is to identify and analyze if and how these three perspectives on academic literacy appear in the scope of the discipline Portuguese Language Workshop: Reading and Text Production (OLP), offered at a distance and every six months, for more than a decade at UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais). This is a study with a qualitative approach (Paiva, 2019), motivated by professional experience as tutors of the course. Based on the syllabus of the discipline, the instructional and informative materials, the resources available and the tasks requested, we found that the first two models mentioned underlie the class. With regard to skills, linguistic aspects are explored individually, based on the demands made explicit by undergraduates in the texts produced. This, however, does not happen without contextualization, but in articulation with academic socialization and the language in use, since the texts read and written are always explored as statements inscribed in discursive genres (Bakhtin, 1997). On the other hand, the third model, which emphasizes the construction of meanings by subjects and the power and identity relations inherent to the university sphere, is little adopted, especially when considering that the class encompasses a large number of students per semester. This fact is a challenge, because it homogenizes literate practices and restricts them to the course itself in the expectation that the students will be able, later, to (re)produce them and (re)adjust them to contexts in which they participate at the university.