ABSTRACT
The scholarship and teaching of writing in the disciplines are endeavors only recently undertaken in Argentine universities. Most related research tended to focus on undergraduates’ difficulties in reading and writing in college. In contrast, the present study has arisen from the relevance to our context of the contributions of North American “writing across the curriculum” (WAC) (Bazerman et al., 2005; Nelson, 2001; Russell, 1990) and “writing in the disciplines” (WID) (Hjortshoj, 2001; Monroe, 2003), as well as English (Lea & Stree, 1998; Lillis, 1999) and Australian (Chanock, 2004; Vardi, 2000) “academic literacies” research. WAC and WID emphasize college instruction to promote learning, while academic literacies studies direct their attention to the institutional power relationships between what teachers and students do, think, and expect regarding written assignments. A further and congruent theoretical root for the present work is an Argentine constructivist approach, the “didactic of language practices” (Ferreiro, 2001; Kaufman, 2004; Lerner, 2003; Nemirovsky, 1999).
