How Students in a Master’s of Education Research Program Perceive Academic Writing: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

The objective of this study was to understand how postgraduate students perceive academic writing, the difficulties they encounter, and how they solve them. Adopting a qualitative approach and based on the biographical narrative tradition, we analysed narratives of university students enrolled in a Master’s of Education Research Program. This corpus of stories was analysed using the AQUAD software. The results revealed a persistent belief in transmissional writing rather than in epistemic or transactional writing. The main conclusion is that university teaching practices proposing academic writing work should be reviewed in order to give a new meaning to academic writing in postgraduate studies.