Implementing academic literacies in practice.

Emerging from the United Kingdom during the last decade, academic literacies research has been instrumental in the growth of academic writing support in English-medium tertiary institutions. Such support has been offered to students in a variety of formats, including remedial courses in study centres, discrete papers in undergraduate degrees, or more recently embedded within mainstream content papers. However, while academic literacies research has raised awareness of the important relationship between subject content and the specific writing requirements of students, the underlying stance of the early academic literacies scholars - that student writing should be conceptualised at the level of epistemology and identity - is still absent from the majority of these courses. This is perhaps the result of a relative lack of research which exemplifies academic literacies as course design. Using the context of a New Zealand art theoretical certificate level paper, this article attempts to remobilise the central principles of academic literacies research by discussing how an academic literacies approach might be implemented in practice. The overarching purpose of this article is to encourage others to consider developing similar courses in their own discipline areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]