Text, writing and literacy: An interdisciplinary approach to text and writing in the academic culture

Abstract

The current paper examines and conceptually analyzes the issue of academic text and writing through an interdisciplinary approach. It also takes into account various models and theories in conceptualizing text, writing and literacy in the academic writing domain, with an special emphasis on meaning-making and social approaches. The complexity and the extent of existing conceptualizations, in the first place, bring the studies of writing and literacy out of the scope of single-disciplinary studies and present it as interdisciplinary ones. As such, the nature and essence of writing, text, academic writing and literacy identities and models as well as multisensory and multimodal literacy models, which in this paper are contrasted with the stereotyped concept of "writing ability", reveal the fact that writing and literacy, whether in addressing the problem or providing answers to it, possess an interdisciplinary nature. Thus, to emphasize more on the nature of text and the process involved in creating academic writing from an interdisciplinary viewpoint, the paper tries to get the semantic aspect of writing in the light of linguistic and sociological perspectives of the text and knowledge production and consider this type of writing not as a single-discipline and skillful activity but a complex and multifaceted one. Understanding this approach will probably respond to inadequacies of the analysis of each of "writing" discourses with a broader insight, and at the same time, provide more possibilities in the production and exchange of knowledge.

Keywords

• text
• academic writing
• literacy myth
• academic literacy model