Writing encounters at Higher Education entry: Students' social representations in six areas of knowledge

Abstract

The expansion of Higher Education shows rising drop-out rates during the first university year, which has fostered the adoption of learning support initiatives. However, little is known about the experiences and expectations of new students. The aim of this article is to account for the social representations of academic writing teaching expressed by first-year university students. To that end, it conducts a contrastive analysis of 360 open answers given by 180 informants from six knowledge areas (Arts, Humanities, Engineering, Health Sciences, Science Pedagogy, and Social Sciences) in a metropolitan state university in Chile. The corpus was qualitatively coded using emergent categories followed by a quantification of occurrences, an inter-rater reliability calculation and a classification of disciplines. Results show that for students the discursive and procedural features of indistinctive genres, such as the essay, are the most challenging writing aspects, especially the management of sources and perspectives, the fulfilment of expectations from teachers and disciplinary communities, and the development of ideas throughout texts. Students consider that writing is learnt through exercising and practice together with the guidance and feedback from teachers and tutors and other complementary strategies such as text deconstruction, modeling, scaffolding and peer work, although they are not able to identify the institutional and curricular environments that offer literacy teaching. These findings may help institutions make the most of young students' experiences and expectations to facilitate their access to the writing practices of their future disciplinary communities.