Beliefsand Practices concerning academicWriting among Postgraduate language-teacher trainees

Abstract

This paper reports on the initial stages of a larger study on plurilingual rhetori-cal communicative competences. Experiential evidence indicated a mismatch between the academic writing competences desired from and displayed by the participants—adult bilingual (L1 Spanish, L+ English) English-language teacher trainees in a postgraduate program at a Colombian university. We examined par-ticipants’ beliefs and practices concerning academic writing to identify the sources of their challenges and develop the evidential basis for identifying appropriate remedial strategies. This was a mixed methods study, in which we analyzed data from semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and student artifacts through the grounded theory approach and descriptive statistics. The results suggest that par-ticipants’ challenges with rhetorical aspects of academic writing stem from a lack of training. However, participants were relatively successful with aspects of writ-ing in which they had been trained: discrete language skills and purely descriptive prose. We conclude their academic writing difficulties are fundamentally non-lin-guistic and hypothesize they would face similar academic writing challenges even if writing in their L1. There is an urgent need to address these challenges, not only because rhetorical competences are increasingly important in a knowledge-driven society but also because teachers need to be able to train their own students in such competences.