Demands and expectations in relation to academic writing: an analysis of freshman students' narratives

Resumo

In this article, the objective is to examine demands and expectations regarding academic written production, from the perspective of students in the Pedagogy course at a Brazilian federal university. It is a research anchored in the theoretical and methodological foundations of literacy studies, particularly academic literacies, also based on the concepts of literacy events and practices. The corpus, explored in the light of the qualitative approach and the ethnographic perspective, consists of transcription records of semistructured interviews, carried out with freshmen students of the referred course, which integrate a database of a broader research focused on the meanings of academic literacies in specific contexts. The analysis of the demands and expectations for academic writing production in the investigated context shows the recurrence of two patterns of behavior related to academic writing: (1) the non-presentation of guidelines as to the way of writing, when proposing a writing activity to the students. students and (2) the presentation of generic feedbacks about the writing done by the students. These behavior patterns seem to hinder the process of familiarizing students with the forms of writing demanded at the university, since, as they are still newcomers, they are probably unaware of the specifics of academic writing.