Literacy support in an EMI university in Central Asia (CA) helps students with the challenging linguistic demands of tertiary study in a second (foreign) language (L2). As Kazakhstan's post-Soviet education system (Yassukova, 2020) lacks significant first-language (L1) reading-to-write education (Keck, 2014; Friedman, 2019), English L2-literacy development has become even more difficult when compared to other regions of the world. Students’ literacy capabilities need to be investigated by L2-literacy tutors in order to scaffold learning better. Questions emerge as to whether it would help that the tutor had developed her L1 literacy through the same (but chronologically-earlier) system. To unpack this question, research can draw on perspectives in language socialisation (LS) (Duff, 2012), which sees learning environments as dynamic socially/culturally situated processes. To this end, this study looks at one L2-English literacy tutor's (author 2) experiences in a tertiary Foundation writing course. The goal was to see how the tutor’s interpretations of classroom literacy problems could inform the teaching of low L1-literacy students’ writing and metalanguage. For this purpose, we studied the reflective journaling (Burton, 2005) of the tutor who wrote reflective journals during a semester-long course in early 2020. The findings indicate that reflexivity can help a tutor find solutions, and that a similarity of background seems to help a local literacy tutor understand, and respond to, many of their students’ needs.

In Portuguese higher education, teachers from different scientific areas recognize that their students have difficulties with writing. Nevertheless, preparing students for academic writing is not a priority and any intervention depends more on the interest of particular teachers than on any institutional policy. The development of a more institutional approach to academic writing in Portugal will imply a deeper knowledge of the multifaceted reality of the students’ situation, involving identification of their own perceptions of their writing processes and of the academic writing practices they are subject to. This is the aim of our study, based on 1150 students’ answers to a questionnaire about literacy practices in Portuguese higher education.Our results show that students seem to be conscious of the procedural nature of writing and of the role and importance of planning, composing and reviewing in the course of their writing processes. As for their perceptions about institutional interventions aimed at fostering writing abilities and teacher feedback on their written work, the answers to the questionnaire allow us to conclude that such support is not frequently offered. There are, however, some differences in the way these issues are considered across the various fields of study.

In this article we analyse Portuguese postgraduate students’ problems and difficulties when performing written tasks in the context of postgraduate programmes. The data presented are the result of a study based on two different data collection procedures: a) the analysis of students’ written work, organised in a portfolio; b) a questionnaire focussing on the difficulties encountered when performing different tasks involving writing: note-taking; planning a text; writing and editing a text (a literature review); and referencing and quoting according to a reference style (APA). The analysis of students' work revealed problems and difficulties in different areas, namely with selecting information, planning the text, and writing the literature review using academic writing conventions. When asked about the reasons for those problems, students often referred to the difference between the literacy tasks they were used to performing in their undergraduate studies and those that they are requested to develop at the postgraduate level. These differences seem particularly relevant when those tasks are related to assessment practices. At undergraduate level, assessment is often based on examinations while at postgraduate level, it is more dependent on the production of other genres such as literature reviews or essays.

Much recent discussion of ‘academic literacies’ has focussed upon the ways in which students are accultured into appropriate discourses and genres in the academy. This may be particularly true where a discipline has a very strong sense of lexicon and content. In awareness of this, semi-structured interviews were carried out in the spring of 2009 with three highly experienced academic writers in the department of Accounting and Finance at the Manchester Business School. The main focus of this paper is on academic literacy practices. The results of the interviews are discussed in this paper, which examines the relationship between experienced writers and their discourse community, the norms within which they work, the place for creativity, and the extent to which each of these may be negotiated. It will firstly consider the concepts of ‘discourse community’ and ‘Community of Practice’ (CoP), before discussing notions of creativity and ideas-generation as a means of informing the academic work that these writers develop.