ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how undergraduate students in a university department of psychology frame academic writing in response to the writing demands made on them by their department and their tutors, and by Psychology as a discipline. It is to the writing demands made in other disciplines; to the role of writing in their university work at large and, more broadly, to the role and demands of literacy and literacies in their university and their subsequent work careers. The chapter offers an additional perspective to that derived from text-based descriptive analyses of students' academic writing, or by studies of the lexico-grammatical and discursive structure of disciplinary genres, in that its approach is primarily interpretive and ethnographic, exploring students' experiences as they voice how they try to cope with the challenges of academic literacies. It addresses four key issues of concern to both students and teachers: Student literacy, Academic writing practices, academic writing in Psychology, Student writing.
