Developing higher education’s academic literacy in English through tutorials in a Spanish-speaking country

Abstract

For the last twenty years, academic literacy in higher education has been a major area of interest for many researchers. In Latin America, the initiatives for the development of students’ writing in tertiary education began in the 2000s and range from pedagogical proposals and writing manuals to the creation of writing centers (Arango & Avila, 2020). This study is set in Armadillo Lab, a recently created writing center at a Chilean university, which offers academic writing tutorials to undergraduate and graduate students in Spanish and English, a language that no other writing center in the country caters to. This quantitative and qualitative study includes 16 tutees over 13 months and the inductive analysis of 33 samples. It seeks to determine the genres students write, analyze tutees’ written production, describe the support they received, and show the impact of the tutorials in their writing. Findings revealed a range of academic and professional genres, which were more common at the graduate levels. Issues in genre knowledge and a variety of textual issues were also found and coincide with findings of academic writing done in Spanish. As for the impact of tutorials, these had a strong positive impact on the written skills of students who attended more often. This study is the first focused on the students’ production of genres written in English in Chile with a writing center’s support, opening up the path for more research in English academic literacy in the country and more work on pedagogical support for Spanish-speakers’ English writing.