Academic Writing: Future primary teachers’ approaches and beliefs.

This research aimed at exploring the implicit theories on academic writing of first-year Education undergraduates, focusing on those who will become primary school teachers. Several studies reported actually how teachers’ beliefs can be strongly related to their students’ beliefs. Of special interest for the present study, Lavelle’s work on writing beliefs and strategies of college students (1993, 1997) yielded five styles in managing writing tasks, associated with two different approaches to writing: deep-elaborative vs. surface-transmissional. We expected that most students involved in the study would express a scholastic approach to writing, with prominence of Procedural and Spontaneous-Impulsive styles. Participants were 231 first-year college students enrolled at a big university in North-East Italy in 2010-2011. Each student was administered the Italian translation of the Inventory of Processes in College Composition (IPCC), a questionnaire developed and validated by Lavelle (1993). Before answering the questionnaire, which took 20 minutes to be completed, participants were also administered a writing test, suitably designed to assess their writing skills. From the results, five patterns of writing beliefs could be yielded, as in Lavelle’s study (1993). Different components emerged though, and new labels had to be assigned to the underlying factors. A prominence of the first pattern could be observed, associated with a Deep-Elaborative approach to academic writing. Participants in this study tended to conceive writing as a transactional process and were aware of its function in the search for personal meaning. Their beliefs about writing as an activity of deep cognitive and affective investment reflect a mature approach, highly desirable in college students.