?The writing practices of Argentinean undergraduates in the digital era?

TARULLO, RAQUEL; BELISA MARTINO

Congreso; V Congreso WRAB (Writing Research Across Borders),; 2021

Writing at university is a fundamental practice that enables students to acquire, create and communicate knowledge. It is through its exercise that undergraduates are able to access the content of a discipline and re-elaborate it in a meaningful way while learning the specific conventions by which their discipline creates and communicates that knowledge (Navarro, 2018). The issue has become more complex in the rise of the digital era, which has produced a deep transformation of production systems and in the access and circulation of knowledge (Martín Barbero, 2012). Indeed, technology and social media have impacted on every aspect of society. Sixty seven percent of Argentineans have a profile on social media, where they spend more than four hours (Hootsuite, 2018). This percentage is even higher in young adults and late teenagers (Kemp, 2018; Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, Levy, & Kleis Nielsen, 2018). Moreover, Instagram has become highly popular among undergraduates (Kemp, 2018; Tarullo, Martino, & Charne, 2018). Therefore, in this context it is of paramount importance to examine the writing practices of today?s undergraduates to observe if they are aware of their own writing, on one hand, and if the profuse use of social media and digital tools has changed the way in which they write academic texts. This paper presents the perceptions of university students from Argentina concerning their academic writing. The results are part of an interdisciplinary exploratory research project developed at a public university in the central region of the country with the objective of studying the use of social media and its impact on academic practices. We used mixed methods. Firstly, we collected data through a digital survey designed by the research team that was applied to a convenience sample of 1286 undergraduates (N:1286), stratified by this university?s academic units, namely the Schools, with a 95% of confidence level. The participants answered the digital questionnaire using their mobile phones between 20 May and 10 June 2018. The second source of data consisted of semi-structured interviews to undergraduates (N:55) conducted in May 2019 and covering a wide range of topics: the role of writing at university, the use of social media, the experiences of social media at the university, among others. While the study is still ongoing, the results of the digital survey indicate that academic writing has not been influenced by the students? online practices: they write in paper, in isolation and with little use of digital tools. In addition, they do not seem to follow disciplinary conventions. However, the preliminary conclusions and questions arisen suggest that it is not the students but the current institutional and pedagogical practices that are responsible for this. This issue will be addressed in a biannual research project during 2019-2020.