Insegnare la scrittura accademica per le discipline e nelle discipline: una sperimentazione sull’italiano

This article presents the results of a pilot educational experimentation aimed at developing academic writing skills in Italian L1. More specifically, from an academic socialisation perspective, the goal was to evaluate if and how the practice of integrating activities and reflections on writing within a regular disciplinary course can help develop students’ writing skills. While a substantial number of studies have investigated the effects of different instructional practices for teaching writing to students in higher education, forms of writing intervention research specifically designed for disciplines and within disciplines are seldom dedicated to Italian L1. The data collection was carried out at the University of Bologna (a.y. 2018/2019). It involved two classes, both attending the teaching course Teaching L2 Italian Language; one acted as experimental group, the other as the control group. Each student wrote a text at the beginning of the semester and one at the end of the course. The topics addressed with the control group covered the regular course contents, i.e. they were not writing-oriented. Differently, the instructional practices designed for the experimental group included activities aimed at developing the students’ awareness of the textual features of the academic genres and at encouraging the conscious management of the processes that govern text planning, drafting and revision. The teaching activities included guided analyses of the exam readings and a variety of individual and group exercises. All texts were examined by means of analytical measurements related to general text organisation, as well as use of cohesion mechanisms, punctuation, and lexicon. In terms of mean values, the results are encouraging for what concerns paragraph management, and use of connectives and commas; on the contrary, forms of explicit instruction seem to be needed to help student focus on lexical choices. Overall, although no always statistically significant differences emerged between the two groups in relation the measures considered, this exploratory study has contributed to identify a number of corrective measures to be made to the research design in view of the next phase of the investigation.