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The "Academic Literacies" Model: Theoryand ApplicationsMary R. Lea & Brian V. StreetPublished online: 24 Jun 2010.

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Mary R. LeaBrian V. Street

The “Academic Literacies” Model:Theory and Applications

Although the term academic literacies was origi-nally developed with regard to the study of lit-eracies in higher education and the university, theconcept also applies to K–12 education. An aca-demic literacies perspective treats reading andwriting as social practices that vary with context,culture, and genre (Barton & Hamilton, 1998;Street, 1984, 1995). The literacy practices of aca-demic disciplines can be viewed as varied socialpractices associated with different communities.In addition, an academic literacies perspectivealso takes account of literacies not directly as-sociated with subjects and disciplines, but withbroader institutional discourses and genres. Fromthe student point of view, a dominant feature of ac-ademic literacy practices is the requirement toswitch their writing styles and genres between onesetting and another, to deploy a repertoire of liter-acy practices appropriate to each setting, and to

handle the social meanings and identities thateach evokes.

BUILDING UPON THEORIES of reading, writing,and literacy as social practices (what has

been called the New Literacy Studies; cf., Barton,1994; Gee, 1996; Street, 1984, 1995), Lea andStreet (1998, 1999) have argued for a new ap-proach to understanding student writing and liter-acy in academic contexts which challenges thedominant deficit model. Rather than engaging indebates about good or bad writing, they conceptu-alized writing in academic contexts, such as uni-versity courses, at the level of epistemology. Theyargued that approaches to student writing and lit-eracy in academic contexts could be conceptual-ized through the use of three overlapping perspec-tives or models: (a) a study skills model, (b) anacademic socialization model, and (c) an aca-demic literacies model.

The first, the study skills model, sees writingand literacy as primarily an individual and cogni-tive skill. This approach focuses on the surfacefeatures of language form and presumes that stu-dents can transfer their knowledge of writing andliteracy unproblematically from one context to an-

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Mary R. Lea is Senior Lecturer at Open University.Brian V. Street is a Professor in the Department of Edu-cation and Professional Studies at King’s CollegeLondon.

Correspondence should be addressed to Mary R. Lea,Institute of Educational Technology, Open University,Milton Keynes, UK, MK 17 8NU. E-mail: m.r.lea@open.ac.uk

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other. The second, termed academic socialization,is concerned with students’ acculturation into dis-ciplinary and subject-based discourses and genres.Students acquire the ways of talking, writing,thinking, and using literacy that typified membersof a disciplinary or subject area community. Theacademic socialization model presumes that thedisciplinary discourses and genres are relativelystable and, once students have learned and under-stood the ground rules of a particular academicdiscourse, they are able to reproduce it unprob-lematically. The third model, academic literacies,is concerned with meaning making, identity, pow-er, and authority, and foregrounds the institutionalnature of what counts as knowledge in any particu-lar academic context. It is similar in many ways tothe academic socialization model, except that itviews the processes involved in acquiring appro-priate and effective uses of literacy as more com-plex, dynamic, nuanced, situated, and involvingboth epistemological issues and social processes,including power relations among people, institu-tions, and social identities. To date, both at the uni-versity level and the elementary and secondary lev-els, it has been the skills and academic socializationmodels that have guided curriculum developmentand instructional practices, as well as research.

The three models are not mutually exclusive;rather, they overlap. All three models could be ap-plied to any academic context, such as examiningthe writing and literacy practices in biology, an-thropology, or teacher education and how studentscome to understand and use those literacy prac-tices in each academic context. There is also over-lap at a theoretical level. For example, both theacademic socialization model and the academicliteracies model focus attention on the relationshipbetween epistemology and acts of writing and lit-eracy in subject areas and disciplines (Bazerman,1988; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995). However,the academic literacies model goes further by fo-cusing on the relationship of epistemology andwriting not just in the subject area in general butalso more generally, in institutional requirements(e.g., regarding plagiarism, feedback), as well asin more specific contexts such as variation acrossindividual faculty members’ requirements and evenindividual student assignments.

The three models are helpful both for research-ers trying to better understand writing and otherliteracy practices in academic contexts, and for ed-ucators who are developing curriculum, instruc-tional programs, and being reflective on their ownteaching practices. For example, universities oftenrun programs that encourage participation in theuniversity by a widening range of people withdiverse backgrounds. An academic socializationmodel might guide how teachers help studentsmove from note taking to doing overhead projec-tor presentations, while an academic literaciesmodel might make explicit how such teaching pro-cedures are framed not as deficit for students whoare nonnative speakers of English but somethingthat all students encounter as the shift from sec-ondary school into postsecondary education. Sim-ilarly, with regard to writing and literacy practiceswithin a law school, a skills model focusing onthe surface features of texts might apply also to anacademic literacies model. This would foregroundtext production and the relationship between writ-ing and epistemology, helping students under-stand what counts as law in a course for level onestudents.

Approaches to Writing and Modelsof Learning

The three models mentioned are associatedwith particular conceptualizations of both lan-guage and learning theory, each having its ownassociated roots and traditions. The study skillsmodel is concerned with the use of written lan-guage at the surface level, and concentrates uponteaching students formal features of language; forexample, sentence structure, grammar, and punc-tuation. It pays little attention to context and is im-plicitly informed by autonomous and additive the-ories of learning, such as behaviorism, which areconcerned with the transmission of knowledge. Incontrast, academic socialization models recognizethat subject areas and disciplines use differentgenres and discourses to construct knowledge inparticular ways (Bazerman, 1988; Berkenkotter &Huckin, 1995). The academic socialization modelis associated with the growth in constructivism

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and situated learning as organizing frames, as wellas with work in the field of sociolinguistics, dis-course analysis, and genre theory. The academicliteracies model draws on both the skills and aca-demic socialization models but goes further thanthe academic socialization model in paying partic-ular attention to the relationships of power, author-ity, meaning making, and identity that are implicitin the use of literacy practices within specificinstitutional settings. It does not view literacypractices as residing entirely in disciplinary andsubject-based communities, but examines how lit-eracy practices from other institutions (e.g., gov-ernment, business, university bureaucracy) are im-plicated in what students need to learn and do.Recent work on the marketization of higher edu-cation, for instance, might be called upon here(Barnett & Griffin, 1997). The academic literaciesmodel is influenced by social and critical linguis-tics (Candlin & Hyland, 1999; Fairclough, 1992)and by recent critiques of sociocultural theory(Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto, & Shuart-Faris,2005; Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, in press) emphasiz-ing a theory of learning that foregrounds power,identity, and agency in the role of language in thelearning process.

Using the Academic Literacies Modelas a Design Frame

Lillis (2003) and Lea (2004) have suggestedthat the academic literacies model needs to be de-veloped as a design frame, with a focus on peda-gogy. In what follows, we show how an academicliteracies model can help provide a design framefor development of curriculum and instruction intwo academic contexts. The first is a universityprogram for widening participation in the univer-sity for linguistic minority students and the secondis a university law program. Although these exam-ples are from the university level in the UnitedKingdom, the principles and issues apply acrossacademic contexts at secondary and elementaryschool levels and in other countries. The examplesshow the limitations of relying solely on studyskills and academic socialization models. They il-lustrate the relative value of an academic literacies

model in emphasizing the importance of teachersbeing explicit in showing students the shifts ingenre and mode as they move between groupwork, speaking, note taking, presentation, moreformal writing, etc. In particular, we identify thelink between cultural practices and different gen-res, the importance of feedback on students’ writ-ten assignments in the learning process, and howboth students and their teachers can learn muchfrom the foregrounding of both meaning makingand identity in the writing process.

The Academic LiteracyDevelopment Programme

One of the difficulties that many students en-counter as they shift into higher education in-volves writing and academic discourse. Studentsfrom linguistic minority community backgroundsmay experience such difficulties to a greater de-gree than some other students. In conjunction withgovernment institutions concerned with wideningparticipation, King’s College London has insti-tuted a program for these attending schools in thenearby area who would like to move on to study ata university (not just at King’s College London).The Academic Literacy Development Programmewas intended to provide additional educational op-portunities for A level students (preuniversity stu-dents in the United Kingdom, equivalent to highschool juniors and seniors1 in the United States)from the local area who were still in the process oflearning English as an additional language. It washoped that participation in the program would en-hance both their A level performance and theirchances of entering higher education. The pro-gram consisted of three-hour sessions on mostSaturday mornings, from January to December. Itwas not an English language program per se, butrather focused on developing the use of academicEnglish in higher educational contexts in the Unit-ed Kingdom. Many of the students had spent lim-ited time in the United Kingdom, and might be un-familiar with the academic language and literacypractices required for university courses.

As part of this program, a team of tutors (theterm used in the United Kingdom for those teach-

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ing at the university level, with teacher used forthose teaching in K–12 schools), including theauthors, conducted sessions based on some ofthe theoretical principles developed from the aca-demic literacies model and with recent work onmultimodality and genre (Kress, 2003; Kress &Street, 2006; Van Dijk, 1997). In these sessions,students were required to interact with differentcategories of text that we defined as different gen-res and modes. We define genres as types of text,both spoken and written (student discussions,written notes, letters, academic essays, etc.). Wewanted to help students be more aware of the dif-ferent language and semiotic practices (the use ofsigns or symbols) associated with the require-ments of different genres in academic contexts.

In an early session, one of the tutors gave a pre-sentation on genre switching (see Table 1 and Fig-ure 1). He drew attention to the fact that prior tohaving a discussion, just having thoughts andideas about a subject already involves certainkinds of representation, with different languageentailments than required in other forms or genres.

Thoughts may, for instance, be free flowing,may not always operate in sentences, and may in-clude images and other nonlinguistic semiosis suchas colors. Then, when the students were asked tomove into group talk and discussion, they were re-quired to provide explicitness, take account oftheir interlocutor (a person involved in dialogue),and employ specific language features and definedspeech patterns. We identified the shift from freeflowing thoughts/ideas to some explicitness in dis-cussion with others as a shift to a different genre,

although as Kress has pointed out (personal com-munication, 2005) it also involves a shift ofmode—from internal thought to external speech.Likewise, as the students shifted from talk and dis-cussion to taking notes, new requirements cameinto play: for example, the need for explicit atten-tion to language structure, use of headings, anduse of visual, as well as language, modes such aslayout. The tutors encouraged students to makepresentations to the whole class using overheadprojector slides and again drew attention to theparticular genre and mode features of a slide:highlighting of key terms, use of single words, andlayout. Finally, students were asked to provide apage of written text based upon the discussionsand overheads. This writing required the use ofjoined up sentences, attention to coherence andcohesion, use of formal conventions of academicwriting, and attention to editing and revision.

Each genre and mode had different qualities. Intheir educational histories, students had not al-ways been made explicitly aware of these qualitiesas they moved between different genres in theirschoolwork. They had rarely been given time todwell on and develop the distinctive features ofeach genre, or to address the question of the rela-tionship of each one, including the fluid overlap ofthe boundaries of each genre. In the program,teachers asked questions such as, “How do genresand modes vary across disciplines, subjects, andfields?” Students from science disciplines ap-peared less familiar with extended prose but adeptat structured layout and use of visual signs. Socialscience students had had more written work to do

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Table 1Key Question and Definitions in Widening Participation Program Sessions

on Genre/Mode Shifting

Question How do genres/modes vary across disciplines/subjects/fields?Genre Type of text: for example, formal/informal, notes, letters, academic essayGenre mode A regularized, organized set of resources for meaning-making: for example, image,

gaze, gesture, movement, speech, writingDiscipline Field of study, academic subject: for example, geography, chemistry, business studies,

area studiesSwitching/transformation Changing meanings and representations from one mode (e.g., speech) into another

mode (e.g., writing), often involving a different mix of both modes (e.g., writingand layout).

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in their school practice but had not necessarily dif-ferentiated its features from those of talk and vi-sual layout as explicitly as being done in these ses-sions. In some cases the students reported that theteachers in their regular school would follow a dis-cussion by asking them to write it up without nec-essarily making explicit the different requirementsas they switched genre from speech to writing orfrom notes to essays. In the Academic LiteracyDevelopment Programme, explicit attention wasfocused on such switching, transformation, andthe changing of meanings and representationsfrom one genre and mode to another. In addition,they discussed how this often involves a differentmix of two or more genres and modes, such as

the notion that writing always creates meaningthrough layout, as well as through the use ofwords. Attention to these issues constituted a basicpremise of the pedagogy in the course.

As we focused on the different genres that par-ticipants used within and across different activityframes, the issue of mode of representation alsoneeded to be addressed. Since the activities dif-fered in terms of type of content represented andgenres used, a linguistic analysis of the texts pro-duced was not sufficient to convey the range ofsemiotic resources used by participants. Multi-semiotic theories of communication emphasizethe need to look at all forms of communication interms of their representation across different

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Figure 1. Genre/mode switching.

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modes—linguistic, actional, and visual—that aredifferently organized and established meaning-making resources (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1976,2001). A multimodal analysis enabled the teachersto depict and analyze the range of meanings ex-pressed in the different activities and the genresassociated with them. It also allowed the teachersto theorize the multimodal nature of literacy, andthus of different genres, that students needed tolearn in order to represent different types of curric-ulum content for different purposes, and thereforeto participate in different activities. For instance,when students presented their own overhead pro-jector slides, we helped them see the importancenot only of subject content (e.g., the themes neces-sary for the statement about their personal back-ground and interests required on the universityapplication form) but also of layout, how they or-dered the data using font, capitals, arrows, etc.

The team members who taught the programalso engaged in ethnographic-style research. Theywere interested in the relationship between theprogram objectives and actual experiences andperceptions of the sessions by the students and thetutors. As one of the tutors who both taught thecourse and engaged in research with it, noted:

The ALD programme tries to challenge some of theexpectations students may have met at school …about language as narrowly defined … the course in-volves issues of discourse, genre, writing as socialprocess … within a notion of building on what theyalready had and bring to the programme rather thantreating them as a deficit and just fixing that.

As Street and Scalone (in press) noted in theiranalysis of the Programme, by expressing per-sonal styles and learning strategies during class-room activities and engaging with their relatedgenres, students participated in both the commu-nity of the academy and in the community formedby the students during the course. Furthermore, byengaging with the types of literacy required inhigher education in the United Kingdom, they col-laboratively constructed an understanding of offi-cial requirements and participated in learning-ori-ented activities. Interaction with other studentsand with tutors was, therefore, fundamental in

making explicit the different types of knowledgestudents already used and that they needed to de-velop and customize to fit higher education stan-dards. Linking these findings with the three mod-els proposed by Lea and Street (1998), the reportby Street and Scalone (in press) concludes:

Treating such students as collaborators in the de-velopment of the academic literacies necessary forengagement with Higher Education in the UnitedKingdom can perhaps offer a different and moresupportive route to “Widening Participation” thanthe more traditional focus on either study skills oracademic socialization.

Open University Law Faculty:Writing Level One Course Materials

The second example of using an AcademicLiteracies Model as a Design Frame involves avery different group of teachers and students: uni-versity law faculty and students. In this example,we focus on the issues of meaning making andidentity in academic writing.

The Open University provides courses for morethan 200,000 students worldwide studying at adistance, both online and with more traditionalprint-based courses. The method of study is de-scribed as supported learning: all students areplaced in either online or face-to-face tutorialgroups and have good access to support from anacademic tutor. Nevertheless, specially writtencourse materials constitute the major part of theteaching context. The courses are designed by theuniversity’s central faculty who—as is the casewith more conventional universities—are appoint-ed on the basis of their expertise and researchstanding in a particular academic field, in this in-stance in law. As with other higher education insti-tutions, the Open University is at present respond-ing to increased student demand for coursesin vocational and professional areas. For someyears, the university has been offering higher-levelcourses for students who wish to gain a law de-gree. Recently, however, the faculty decided to ex-tend their course offerings and provide introduc-

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tory, undergraduate, level one study in law, whichwould introduce students:

to the nature and function of rules and law, to the dis-tinctiveness of legal reasoning, and to the way inwhich law both responds to social phenomenaand contributes to the development of different so-cial, business and economic institutions (RetrievedOctober 17, 2005, from the Open University Website at: http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/bin/p12.dll?C01W100_9_63).

Since they were more familiar with conven-tional, higher-level university law study, the fac-ulty designing this course and its materials wereoffered two professional development workshopsin order to explore the nature of writing level onecourse materials. These workshops were based onprinciples from the academic literacies model,foregrounding the relationship between mode,genre, literacies, and identities. However, unlikethe students in the King’s College Academic Lit-eracy Development Programme, faculty partici-pating in the workshops were not introduced ex-plicitly to any of the underlying principles thatprovided the theoretical perspective that under-pinned the tasks and activities. Rather, facultymembers were offered the opportunity to considerthe implications of being an academic writer in re-lation to the very specific mode of written coursematerials, with a particular but implicit focus onissues of meaning making and identity in thiscontext.

Participants were introduced to the nature ofwriting as more than a technical skill, again withno explicit mention of the theoretical work onwriting as social practice. In order to foregroundthe nature of both meaning making and identity inthe writing process, the first workshop concen-trated on the student perspective, exploring thenature of different written genres in samples ofdistance learning materials. It also examined thewritten genres that constituted the discipline oflaw and the implications of student writer identity(Ivanic, 1998), but in this instance in relation tothe reading process, in relation to students’ read-ing of distance learning materials. The underlyingprinciples of an academic literacies model were

implicitly introduced through participant engage-ment in the activities themselves.

The first workshop provided faculty with theopportunity to explore the main challenges in mak-ing distance course materials successful through alens that concentrated on meaning making andidentity. It examined how writing for studentsfrom a diverse audience contrasted with otherkinds of academic writing, with which partici-pants were more familiar. The law faculty partici-pants considered what difficulties they believedstudents might have in reading and working withthe course materials, and what potential problemsmight arise between students’ everyday knowl-edge about law and studying law as an academicsubject. Faculty members were asked to constructimaginary case studies of students who might takesuch a course, concentrating on issues such asprior experience, both of study and of law—in lay,professional, and academic contexts—and stu-dents’ expectations of studying at a distance. Inworking together on these activities, participants,who had no particular academic interest in lan-guage or literacies, began to tacitly identify the di-verse literacy practices involved in the meaning-making process, including practices of potentialstudents who would bring their own identities andunderstandings to their reading of the course ma-terials. These issues were explored without explic-itly introducing faculty to the particular languageof description provided by literacies research,concerning the constraints and opportunities ofmode and their implications in relation to literacypractices.

The second workshop followed some weeks af-ter the first, giving participants the opportunity toreflect upon the implications of the workshop ac-tivities for their own practice. Although languageis clearly foregrounded in the study of law, partici-pants reported that they had not previously consid-ered the complexity of writing course texts. Thefirst workshop had made them think much moreabout the issues involved in writing for a poten-tially very diverse audience. Prior to the work-shops, their main focus had been on the contentmatter of this particular course, one which some-what broke with tradition of what counts as under-graduate law study. What is interesting to the au-

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thors, as academic literacies researchers, is thatfaculty were able to engage with the notion ofwriting as social and contextual practice withoutour explicitly introducing the research or its con-ceptual framing on which the workshops had beenbased. Although faculty members recognized thatthe course materials needed to be written in a waythat addressed diverse audiences, they were alsoconcerned that an attempt to simplify and ex-plicate fully might lead to a dilution of legal con-cepts, or even inaccuracies in the course material.This indicated some tension between an aca-demic socialization and an academic literaciesperspective.

The second workshop also had a rather differ-ent focus, away from the student and toward fac-ulty members themselves as writers. One of theunderlying assumptions of an academic literaciesmodel is that educators need to be concerned withliteracies more generally across academic con-texts and not only the assessed texts producedby students, such as the papers students submitfor grades or the examinations they take (Lea &Street, 1999). By focusing on the writing practicesof the academics themselves, the sessions drew onthis broader notion of academic literacies, recog-nizing the variety in institutional practices that areinvolved in academics’ own writing. Starting withthe notion of academics as writers, participants

were given the opportunity to examine their ownliteracy practices and the implications these mighthave for their writing identities as course materialswriters. As in the previous workshop, where thefocus had been on identity and meaning makingfor the student reader, the conceptual framing wasleft implicit. Faculty members were asked to listthe kinds of writing that they undertook as part oftheir role as an academic (see Figure 2). This pro-duced a list of very diverse texts. However, in dis-cussions around the nature of their writing, an in-teresting distinction emerged between public andprivate writing, which participants regarded asparticularly significant for them as writers in bothprofessional and academic domains. As with thestudents, they were bringing their own experi-ences of meaning making and identity to theirwriting of this particular law course, thus fore-grounding the relationship between writing and is-sues of epistemology, which is a dominant fram-ing in the literacies research field.

The workshops provided the opportunity to op-erationalize the principles of the academic lit-eracies model in an institutional context (Lea &Street, 1998). In this instance, pedagogic practiceis associated with the specific mode of distancelearning course materials. With their focus onidentity, meaning making, student diversity, writ-ing for different audiences, and faculty academic

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Figure 2. Law faculty experience of other academic/professional writing.

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writing, these two workshops enabled members ofthe faculty to engage with some of the key con-cepts from the academic literacies model, despitethe fact that they were not familiar with this lan-guage of description, nor were they introduced toit explicitly in the sessions. The sessions were pre-sented as very practical in nature, and designed toaddress faculty concerns about writing this spe-cific law course, enabling them to reflect upontheir own writing and the ways in which the sub-ject of law is constructed in academic (as opposedto legal) contexts through particular and context-ualized writing practices, thus foregrounding therelationship between writing and epistemologicalimperatives. It also provided them with the tools toconsider the ways course texts are mediated byboth student and academic identities, and howmeanings are negotiated through engagement inwritten and multimodal texts in specific and local-ized contexts.

Conclusion

With regard to writing and other literacy prac-tices in educational contexts, three models havebeen proposed to guide educators: a skills model,an academic socialization model, and an academicliteracies model. Using experiences in two verydifferent academic programs, we have shown howan academic literacies model can be used to framecurricular and instructional design. Rather than fo-cusing on student deficits, an approach using theacademic literacies model foregrounds the varietyand specificity of institutional practices, and stu-dents’ struggles to make sense of these. In the twoacademic contexts described in this article, theinstructional leaders (the tutors) worked closelywith the participants (the students in the AcademicLiteracy Development Programme and the lawfaculty in the Open University workshops) to col-laboratively investigate the range of genres,modes, shifts, transformations, representations,meaning-making processes, and identities in-volved in academic learning within and acrossacademic contexts. These understandings, whenmade explicit, provide greater opportunities forteaching and learning, as well as for examining

how such literacy practices are related to epis-temological issues.

Notes

1. A level refers to students in the United Kingdomwho are one or two years away from applying to auniversity. In order to be admitted, these studentsneed to do well in their studies and on their A-levelexaminations. There is no exact analogous situ-ation in the United States; the closest would bejuniors and seniors in high school taking classespreparing them for college, and taking college en-trance tests such as the SATs, Advance Placementexaminations, etc.

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