Academic writing by indigenous students at university

Abstract

Academic writing from indigenous students have been studied in bilingual contexts and interculturality from different perspectives such as decolonization, programs aiming to stop school dropouts and the teaching of academic literacy. This paper intends to describe academic discourse from indigenous students at university through their writing of argumentative texts, in order to know what aspects should be prioritized when teaching academic literacy and how it should be learned. A corpus of argumentative texts from first-semester indigenous students from various ethnicities was analyzed in regard to four categories: lexical density, text fragmentation, superstructure and intertextuality. We found that none of the texts produced fulfill completely the requisites to be considered part of academic discourse.   What   has   to be prioritized with the intention of achieving academic literacy is: to widen student’s technical lexicon in Spanish, to identify and use discursive and semantic resources with the purpose of creating cohesion and give coherence to texts, to build texts with the correct superstructure and to include polyphony for different goals and with the accurate conventions demanded.