ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which Tara, a sixteen-year-old from Guinea, solved a range of “problems” posed by academic reading and writing. With transcripts of tutoring sessions and interview data, this chapter illustrates how Tara weighed her options, made compromises, and applied her knowledge and strategies when reading and writing academic texts. Tara’s strategies, decisions, and navigations as a reader and writer of academic texts underscore the complex, dynamic, and disciplinary-specific nature of academic literacies. The chapter concludes with a note about academic literacy pedagogy focused on problem solving. Rather than teach generic skills and rules about reading and writing, educators can work with students to identify the kinds of problems they encounter while reading and writing, reflect on the nature of the problems, and develop possible approaches for addressing the problem—all the while stressing the specificity and contextual nature of each problem.
