The dynamics of building academic writing knowledge in interaction

Becoming expert academic writers requires students to develop understanding, awareness and skills with regards to discipline-specific discourses. To develop such knowledge, talk around drafts is essential. Various studies traced how students develop knowledge about and of academic writing, but few explored how such knowledge is invoked and developed in interaction. The study therefore investigates the dynamics of introducing and using academic writing knowledge when tackling writing issues in interaction. The interaction is situated in a facilitated writing group – an important yet under-researched arena for talk around text. The data consist of video-recordings of group meetings with six postgraduate students who use English as an additional language, collected over 8 weeks at a Swedish university. To investigate how knowledge was introduced and used in the group, the study takes a socio-cultural perspective and applies the Vygotskian notion of cultural tools combined with discourse analytic approaches. The analysis shows how students draw on complex techniques to negotiate academic writing knowledge. Their interactional text work oscillates between abstract norms and concrete texts. Concepts of academic writing (e.g. research aim) are partly unpacked frontstage in the group, and partly backstage in individual notes. The results call for extending genre-pedagogic approaches of learning by discovery.