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

This study explores assumptions and expectations expressed by novice
university students about writing in an academic setting. Knowledge of these
notions and beliefs among students at the transition of secondary to higher
education may help university teachers to design learning activities that
enable academic newcomers to distance themselves from naive or biased
renditions of texts and writing, and to come to grips with the intricacies of the
discourse practices in their new environment. The data are drawn from a
corpus of meta-writing assignments performed by 118 students in their first
year at university during the first week of a freshman course in academic
communication skills. Our findings confirm and substantiate the presumption
that, when expressing their thoughts about writing in an academic setting,
novices predominantly convey issues related to ‘surface features’ (e.g. text
length) or broad, general characteristics that are not specific for writing in an
academic context. When considering ‘deep features’, some novices emphasize
their unfamiliarity with, or even anxiety about writing practices in their
new environment. A minority articulates quite realistic notions about the
instrumentality of texts in academic communities.