Comment les étudiants entrants s’approprient-ils les discours universitaires ?

Abstract

Confronted to didactical academic discourses, both oral and written, first year university students demonstrate significant difficulties of comprehension. These are symptoms of the students coming to grips with discourses which present a number of defining features on the conceptual, rhetorical, and argumentative dimensions, and which are embedded in a very specific context of linguistic usage. The authors have had the opportunity to witness this appropriation process in the setting of an advanced course in oral and written communication for future students of the faculties of social sciences. In this article, the authors share the first results of their observations and propose a diagnostic of the underlying causes of the difficulties of comprehension within the process of appropriation of academic discourse by first year students. Early findings show that the strategies deployed by many students to resolve problems of comprehension lead them to ignore one or other defining feature of the academic discourses at hand. More specifically, a significant number of students fail to take into account the diversity of tunes within academic discourse as well as the multiple modal positionings of the content. Also, students repeatedly demonstrate a lack of precision in the treatment of the conceptual content.