Teaching writing in the university: academic literacy as situated teaching work

Abstract

This article presents a didactic intervention carried out with a group of university students aimed at strengthening their academic reading and writing practices, particularly deep comprehension, paraphrasing, thesis identification, and the construction of argumentative texts. Throughout the semester, different genres and classroom activities were used to examine how students approached analytical reading and how they reconstructed ideas from the texts in order to integrate them into their own writing. The study describes the design of the intervention, the institutional context, the characteristics of the group, and the procedures used to produce and analyze the data derived from their written work. The analysis of the students’ texts, the instructor’s field notes, and the successive rewritings made it possible to identify progress, tensions, and shifts in the ways students organized their ideas, refined concepts, and developed arguments. The findings also highlight the central role of teaching work in academic writing instruction, understood as a situated practice that requires continuous pedagogical decision-making, sustained support, and specific mediations. Results indicate that academic literacy cannot be assumed as a set of pre-existing skills but rather as a formative process built through reading, dialogue, guidance, and rewriting. The article concludes by emphasizing the need for institutions to recognize academic writing instruction as a fundamental dimension of the university curriculum and of contemporary teaching work.