Student Writing In Higher Education: An Academic Literacies Approach

Jeremy Fish

This journal focuses on the idea that the standard of student 'literacy' is falling, but it is not fit to try and solve individual problems, rather to look at the wider institutional approach towards the complex writing practises that occur at degree level.

The Approach Models of Student Writing:

Study Skills - Student writing as technical and instrumental skill.

Focus on 'fixing' 'surface' features, grammar and spelling. However, that is to assume literacy is these surface features, and it is not the case.

Academic Socialisation - Student writing as transparent medium of representation.

Orientates students to interpret learning tasks through 'deep', 'surface' and 'strategic' lenses. This makes the assumption though that once these practises are learnt, they are a one size-fits-all approach for the entire institution.

Academic Literacies - Student writing as meaning-making and contested.

A series of social practices, the student switches between practices deploying the appropriate repertoire of linguistics to the requirement of the writing. Problems in student writing might be attributed to the gulf between academic staff expectations and student interpretation of what is involved.

.

This journal essentially covers the process of how a student approaches academic writing and the difference between teacher expectations and a student's interpretation, and I do feel there is a gap.

The journal explains that academics and tutors are restricted by their own academic frameworks and if some writing does not make sense to their installed frameworks then they reach for familiar descriptive categories like 'structure and argument', 'clarity' and 'analysis' in order to give feedback. In reality students are limited by their own individual perspective and these categories are less meaningful.

Students enter academic writing having to learn the different constructs of each subject, each with disparate requirements. They can not apply one structure for all, 'one-size-fits-all' and so get poorly marked with poor feedback because the tutors have not expressed clearly how the student should approach the essay. Furthermore, the essay that would have been submitted would not fit within the tutors academic framework so the feedback would not clarify anything further because of the familiar descriptive categories which mean nothing.

Comment 

I have personally felt this gap in my time as a student learning how to write well-written academic writing, in the first year especially the approach was very difficult to transition to from the A Level way of writing, in hand with poor instruction of how to write in the precise right way did not help. The phrase I heard most was 'you'll get used to it', which virtually left me as a student to 'figure' it out by myself. This might mean, as I have 'self-taught' myself, any inherent problems that have been left unrefined in my writing is now installed unchecked with no tutor correcting but simply putting 'lack of clarity' or 'need of analysis'.


The top image reflects my recent visit to the American Museum in Bath last week. It was good.