Academic Literacy: history of literacy and expectations about the writing practices of the Languages Course

In this article, I analyze the history of literacy of a student taking up the Languages Course from a private university in the city of São Paulo. Backed up by reflections from the theoretical field of the New Literacy Studies, I investigate how the student’s previous literacy history and her contact with speeches about writing had an impact on the development of expectations about the writing practices in the Languages course. To this end, I refer to stretches in a transcription from a semi-structured interview held in 2009, when the participant in the research was in the first semester of the course. The analysis undertaken herein aims to show that the understanding of the previous literacy history of the public entering university can collaborate so that the academic writing conventions and, in turn, those of the academic genres are not presented to the students as something part of the common sense, rather, as something which can be taught.