Academic Writing: an exclusion factor in postgraduate training processes?

Abstract

Academic writing plays a central role in the production and dissemination of knowledge, which is the fundamental purpose in postgraduate training. The article is about one of the studied cases, as part of a broader investigation, whose objective was to understand the transformations in the academic writing of postgraduate students from three Colombian regions. This particular multiple case study had the purpose of understanding the transformations in the writing of an intercultural context, made up of 18 students, seven of them belonging to a Colombian indigenous town. The written productions elaborated at the beginning and end of the postgraduate course were taken, which were analyzed from the categories: Speaker/Enunciator, Interlocutor/Enunciator, Topic/The Statement, Superstructure and Macro/Microstructure, based on the interactive discursive perspective of Martinez et al. (2004). The results show that despite the positive transformations of all the writings, difficulties still persist, especially in indigenous students, an issue that can be a factor of exclusion within academic communities and that invites us to reflect on new ways of assuming the academic literacy in intercultural contexts.