Academic Writing Abilities in Education undergraduate

Past international research highlighted students’ writing difficulties in academic contexts. Particularly our study aims at exploring the writing abilities of Italian college students who will become primary school teachers. 150 freshers were administered a set of writing tasks, suitably designed to assess linguistic (spelling, morphosyntax, punctuation, vocabulary) and textual measures (coherence, cohesion, comprehension and composition). We expected students getting higher scores in linguistic rather than in textual section. Correlations between coherence, cohesion and composition were also hypothesized. Moreover, we expected a relationship between participants’ instructional background and the application of elaborative strategies in composition. Focusing on the synthesis writing task, we analyzed some linguistic and textual features using two indexes built in a previous study by Boscolo, Quarisa & Arfè (2007). The results indicate that future primary teachers have considerable difficulties in writing, both at linguistic and textual level. Our findings also highlight the need for an improvement in students’ writing competences, whose mastery has proved to be essential for academic success and in future professional contexts.