Academic literacies and the ?new orders?: implications for research and practice in student writing in higher education

The arrival of large numbers of ‘non-traditional’ students in higher education has led to rethinking the idea of the university itself and of the role of writing within it. This paper contributes to that debate by considering student writing within a broader framework than that of simply study skills or academic socialization, as in dominant approaches. Instead it locates concerns around writing within the context of New Literacy Studies, which see reading and writing as social and ideological practices conceptualized in this context as a field of ‘academic literacies’. The broader context within which academic literacy practices are located is here termed the ‘new orders’: the new work order, the new communicative order and the new epistemological order. The paper proposes a model for linking these two areas of research and practice - the new orders and ‘academic literacies’.