TRAINING EXPERIENCES IN READING AND WRITING IN A COLOMBIAN UNIVERSITY: THE PERSPECTIVE OF A PROFESSOR (original) (raw)
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During summer 2012 the team of the Project ILEES started applying an online survey in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico to a purposeful sample of scholars; later, in fall 2012 and winter 2013, the same survey was applied in Brazil, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico. The first round of the outcomes of the survey offers tendencies about the types of curriculum initiatives and research endeavors undertaken in the region. In this paper, I will present two qualitative analyses that are also derived from the Project ILEES aiming at speculating how writing is conceived as a teachable content and as a research site by some of the programs identified by survey information and according to accounts of some scholars interviewed from Spanish Speaking countries in the region. Exploring the assumptions about writing might be an important step in defining further agendas that could be led by the advocates of this field in the region.
An emerging academic community might be strengthened if its research programs and scholars' education in the field are envisioned based on a historical account of its academic discourse community. Higher education writing in Spanish as a mother tongue is a field of teaching practice and research that emerged in the late 90's, mostly led by Argentine, Chilean, Colombian, and Mexican initiatives. An academic discourse community is not located specifically in physical settings. Rather, this type of discourse creates and is created by a research community mostly by its publications; especially, the scientific articles that are used to communicate and define central issues in the fields. Under this theoretical assumption, this pilot project aims at mapping the academic discourse community of the field on academic writing in Spanish in Colombian higher education. Accordingly, textual analysis have been conducted through scientific articles to make inferences about the research spaces configured, the agendas envisioned, and the stakeholders involved in such agendas. This pilot project might confirm that after 2006, in the Colombian case, it can be identified a scholarly rupture in the community discourse that turned from the advocacy of the freshman courses towards the advocacy of teaching writing across the higher education experiences. Ultimately, this pilot project confirms the incipient development of the field on academic writing in Colombian higher education in theoretical terms. One of the prominent features of the agendas envisioned for further research in the field is to conduct studies whose findings should be applied in the programmatic endeavors addressing mostly institutional practices (i.e., curricula, classroom practices, and institutional programs). Consequently, research projects aiming at exploring larger international disciplinary debates (i.e., transfer issues across time and events, developmental studies, academic writing and other semiotic systems of inscription, cognitive processes in academic and scientific writing, and ethnographies in work places), might be conducted to boost the theoretical development of the Colombian field.
On the teaching of university writing in Latin America
Composition Studies, 2021
During the last 20 years, the teaching of writing has grown worldwide as a dynamic field of international academic practice and research, as attested to by the emergence of disciplinary societies, conferences, and publications. In the spirit of building an integrative vision of the contribu¬tions of teaching and research in writing in Latin America, this article offers an overview of what “writing studies” mean in the region. On the one hand, we report on the particularities of university systems in the region, as teaching and researching writing are situated and respond to institutional needs and opportunities. On the other hand, we explore the central role of language and discourse studies in the disciplinary development of the field and outline the current state of scholarship with particular attention to the production of writing knowledge and theory.
ACADEMIC LITERACIES IN THE SOUTH: WRITING PRACTICES IN A BRAZILIAN UNIVERSITY
MOTTA-ROTH, D. Academic literacies in the south: writing practices in a Brazilian university
Paulo Freire (2000, p. 46), the renowned Brazilian educator, once stated that “one learns to read by reading.” To understand what writing does, we need to experience interaction mediated by writing. In this essay I focus on the importance of learners’ participation in academic activities for the development of academic literacies: the material and symbolic acts that (re)produce verified knowledge, associated with higher education. I will give an overview of the writing practices at the Federal University of Santa Maria (Universidade Federal de Santa Maria or UFSM), where I have been investigating and teaching academic writing since 1994. The essay starts with a brief history and mission statement about the university. The second section brings a general description of writing at UFSM in relation to why and in relation to what goals this writing occurs. In the third section, I analyze English undergraduate and Applied Linguistics graduate students’ answers to a questionnaire about their literacy practices. The essay closes with a description of the principles for a writing program and a note on ambitions and frustrations regarding writing pedagogy in my local context.
This paper aims to understand the initial milestones, causes, academic activities, theoretical foundations and disciplines involved in the scholarly development of Higher Education reading and writing studies in Latin America. Eight academic leaders from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and México were interviewed in order to learn their perspectives on this development. Findings reveal that the main founding milestones are conferences starting by the 2000's decade; the UNESCO Chair is the current main academic network that congregates scholars interested in this topic; the reasons for the ield's emergence are related to the increasing growth in college enrolments. Overall, a growing interdisciplinary ield can be observed, but its disciplinary identity is still difuse, given the ongoing jurisdictional disputes.
In Latin America, as in much of the world, the teaching and support of academic writing in higher education is a new endeavor, with little prior professional, institutional infrastructure, and scholarship, and few academic networks. Therefore, developments of the efforts to educate writers in higher education in Central and South American countries are interesting research sites to examine the history of universities in the region. The ILEES project aims at developing a comprehensive, diverse, and inclusive map of research and pedagogy tendencies in teaching higher education writing in Latin-American region. This paper presents such tendencies emerging from an online survey applied to a purposeful sample by a snowball technique in Argentine, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. Regarding theoretical influences, the findings might confirm that the field of academic writing in Latin-American region has been boosted by eclectic disciplinary efforts from Linguistics, Psychology, and Education. Concerning curriculum arrangements, as might be expected some higher education curricula in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, have incorporated freshman composition courses in Spanish. Such curriculum arrangements may be an evidence of the impact of the scholarships led by Chairs of UNESCO for reading and writing in Latin-American region. However, institutional efforts addressing senior students and faculty development programs may be also part of the current agendas, although less visible in the official curricula. The analysis has revealed thus far that theoretical influences in the region could have been part of importation processes mostly led by an Argentine scholar and two Spanish scholars. Therefore, the impacts of progressive thinking related to advocating the systematic endeavors across higher education, due to the complex process of becoming an academic writer, may be confirmed by the findings obtained thus far.
Revista Internacional de Lenguas Extranjeras / International Journal of Foreign Languages, 2022
For the last twenty years, academic literacy in higher education has been a major area of interest for many researchers. In Latin America, the initiatives for the development of students’ writing in tertiary education began in the 2000s and range from pedagogical proposals and writing manuals to the creation of writing centers (Arango & Avila, 2020). This study is set in Armadillo Lab, a recently created writing center at a Chilean university, which offers academic writing tutorials to undergraduate and graduate students in Spanish and English, a language that no other writing center in the country caters to. This quantitative and qualitative study includes 16 tutees over 13 months and the inductive analysis of 33 samples. It seeks to determine the genres students write, analyze tutees’ written production, describe the support they received, and show the impact of the tutorials in their writing. Findings revealed a range of academic and professional genres, which were more common at...
This profile essay describes the evolution and current structure of the Program of Academic Reading and Writing (PLEA) at the Sergio Arboleda University in Bogota: from its inception in the 1980s as the “Grammar Program” to its current status as a two-semester compulsory course focused on university-level academic reading and writing. It also presents the most important results of the investigation conducted to recognize learning by the students in this first-year course of study, and the evaluation of this Program conducted among teachers of these courses and teachers of other subjects. New aspects of PLEA since the assessment, to extend the reach of the Program to higher-level students and to faculty in disciplines, are also described. The profile concludes by noting the first Colombian national conference on reading and writing in higher education and the formation of REDLEES, the Reading and Writing in Higher Education Network for Colombia
Retos linguísticos de los estudiantes universitarios en el desarrollo de la escritura académica
Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, 2009
The focus of this paper is on the challenges that Colombian university students live when developing academic writing in English as a foreign language. At the macro level, it points to the importance of a theoretically informed understanding of teaching practices in ELT; at the micro level it intends to sensitize ELT practitioners, and particularly academic writing instructors, on the diverse challenges students-particularly non-native learners-experience when appropriating a largely unknown discourse upon entry to the university. Excerpts from participants in a two-year study intertwine with a theoretical discussion on academic writing are presented.