ABSTRACT
Academic literacy, a necessary skill for university success, includes the ability to integrate information from sources to demonstrate understanding in writing. The completion of integrated writing tasks has been explored with additional language learners using the (future) language of instruction. However, in non-anglophone contexts, language users, not learners, develop academic literacy through plurilingual integrated writing tasks – input is in English, and output remains in the university’s language. Understanding how these tasks are completed by language users developing academic literacy is essential to ensure equal opportunities for academic literacy development. Thus, in this exploratory study, six master’s students completed a plurilingual integrated writing task. Their perceptions and practices were collected in interviews. The results show the acceptance of the hegemony of English at their academic level. For language support, participants did not exploit technology with some believing this to be negative. Prior education on the genre of scientific articles permitted some students to understand the input and output text structures. Note-taking was largely monolingual although those that wrote in French often kept the terms/concepts in English. The findings suggest that students could benefit from studying bilingual abstracts and being taught how to exploit discipline-specific corpora.
