Difficult, lenghty, serious: First year students' assumptions about writing in an academic setting

This study explores assumptions and expectations expressed by noviceuniversity students about writing in an academic setting. Knowledge of thesenotions and beliefs among students at the transition of secondary to highereducation may help university teachers to design learning activities thatenable academic newcomers to distance themselves from naive or biasedrenditions of texts and writing, and to come to grips with the intricacies of thediscourse practices in their new environment. The data are drawn from acorpus of meta-writing assignments performed by 118 students in their firstyear at university during the first week of a freshman course in academiccommunication skills. Our findings confirm and substantiate the presumptionthat, when expressing their thoughts about writing in an academic setting,novices predominantly convey issues related to ‘surface features’ (e.g. textlength) or broad, general characteristics that are not specific for writing in anacademic context. When considering ‘deep features’, some novices emphasizetheir unfamiliarity with, or even anxiety about writing practices in theirnew environment. A minority articulates quite realistic notions about theinstrumentality of texts in academic communities