Academic Writing, Argumentation and Teaching Practices in the First Year of Higher Education

Abstract

This article shows how teachers of the career of Linguistics and Literature, form an Argentine public university, intertwine teaching and writing practices to work in their classrooms with the epistemic potential of writing. From a multiple case study configured as a naturalist didactic research, this inquiry works with two kinds of data: interviews with students and collection of documents (writing assignments and texts produced by students). The strategies of coding and contextualization guided to data analysis, paying attention to the relations of similarity and contiguity between them. From the theoretical point of view, having the studies on writing across the curriculum (WAC) as background, this research returns to the notion of didactic transposition proposed by Chevallard. This notion allows us to explore how the teachers intertwine teaching and writing practices by working in their classes with a disciplinary writing practice. Thus, we found that to bring into the classroom a writing practice that would potentially become epistemic and not preparatory (i.e., as a simple exercise for the future), teachers needed to work with argumentative writing and to carefully check the production circumstances of such practices. These circumstances are similar to the ones developed within the disciplinary communities to which the students were aspiring to belong.

Keywords

• ponencia
• transposición didáctica
• condición didáctica