ABSTRACT
The coherence of the didactics of writing, as a subdiscipline of the didactics of French, comes from the analysis and description of teaching and learning writing at primary and secondary school, where “French” as a discipline contains, along with grammar, spelling, reading, literature, and so on, a learning object which is called “writing.” Universities are not the “natural territories” of the didactics of French: it is difficult to designate French as a discipline at university, given that French university professors are more likely to speak of Literature or Letters, Linguistics, Language Study, or Communications. The concepts and methods that have been developed in the didactics of French, however, are of interest in the study of university writing. Moreover, as many studies in didactics at school have shown, the teaching and learning of writing is not limited to French classes. Didacticians of French describe and analyze, often in collaboration with other didacticians, writing in disciplines other than French-for example, in science or mathematics.2 It should also be noted that didacticians from other disciplines appropriate the tools and methods elaborated in the didactics of French or in the field of language study in order to describe and analyze language practices (written or oral) in the classroom (science, mathematics, and so on). These relations between didacticians of different disciplines, when they investigate the role of language practices in learning and teaching, are nearly the same that can be found in secondary schools between teachers of different disciplines when they think about how to improve the students’ writing abilities (Reuter, in press). For all of the above reasons, the absence of French and French writing as a university discipline, the relative transversal nature of language practices (which must be, however, questioned), the contribution of French didactics to research on university writing, we propose to use the term university literacies to designate the field of research which analyzes written language practices at university.
