Alfabetización académica en Derecho: experiencia y resultados de un programa de escritura

Claudia Poblete Olmedo; Lisbeth Arenas Witker; Alejandro Córdova Jiménez

doi:10.5354/0719-5885.2020.60562

Call to publish scientific articles that will be received between June 20 and November 20, 2019, referring to:

University Pedagogy: With topics such as public policies in higher education, legislative system and reforms, academic programs, comparative policies, massification processes, quality assurance, legal professions, and others in higher education as a general field, referring to the Chilean and international context .

Didactics of Law: With topics whose centrality is related to processes of innovation, learning, curriculum, innovations, teaching experiences, students and teachers characterization , among others in legal education in the Chilean and international context.

Ethical and citation standards (Chicago-deusto) must be taken care of, in addition to the originality of the research or innovation.

Academic literacy in Law

Authors

Claudia Poblete Olmedo Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8182-5001
Lisbeth Arenas Witker Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4038-8663
Alejandro Córdova Jiménez Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4038-8663

Vol. 7 No. 2 (2020)

https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-5885.2020.60562

Abstract

During the first couple of years of university, students face many difficulties because they have not acquired the reading and writing skills that are fundamental in their fields of study, or the skills are not necessary in the career they chose to pursue (Bono y De la Barrera 1998; Narvaja de Arnoux, Di Stefano y Pereira, 2002). Considering this situation, some universities in our country and in Latinamerica offer courses or workshops on reading and writing for freshmen students. Nevertheless, the focus of most of these courses is set on remedial measures that do not provide students with effective skills due to the fact that they are far from each discipline or programme’s academic reality (Carlino, 2012: 200). To address this, the main goal of this investigation is to describe the specific work of law students who attend the course «Text Production Skills» at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, in which they produce a precise type of genre: the law report. This genre is a legal and professional one adapted to the academic context. In addition, this investigation will show the strategies used by the students in order to fulfill their tasks. The preliminary results indicate that a) students use different strategies (reformulation, definition, among others) as a way to get the legal/technical language closer to the inexperienced audience assuring a better understanding of those terms. And at the same time, b) students improve their writing skills during the learning process that the course implies.

Keywords:

Academic writing, law report, vocational literacy, legal language

Downloads

Altmetrics

How to Cite

Poblete Olmedo, C., Arenas Witker, L., & Córdova Jiménez, A. (2020). Academic literacy in Law: experience and results of a writing program. Revista Pedagogía Universitaria Y Didáctica Del Derecho, 7(2), 23–50. https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-5885.2020.60562