Academic literacies in the Mozambican context

research, perspectives, and challenges

Abstract

Mary Lea and Brian Street published in 1998 the article titled: “Student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach” in the journal: “Studies in Higher Education”. This article reignited the debate about what it means to be academically literate, as well as proposed the concept of academic literacies that is still widely used to designate the practices of reading and writing in the academic environment. As a result, a body of work emerged in various countries around the world reflecting the theoretical and practical implications of Lea and Street's article in several academic areas. Thus, this article aims to reflect on the research, perspectives, and challenges in the field of academic literacy in Mozambique, as a new field of study that allows us to see academic reading and writing practices not as individual and universal skills, but rather as situated and contextualized practices. To this end, a corpus of academic papers published in the last 10 years (2015-2025) was analyzed regarding academic reading and writing from a socially and culturally oriented approach in the Mozambican context. Methodologically, a systematic literature review (SLR) was adopted, which consisted of mapping and analyzing the published research within the specified period to unveil the perspectives and highlight the challenges that need to be addressed to expand studies on academic reading and writing from an academic literacy approach. The results obtained indicate a trend towards the production of exploratory and descriptive works. Regarding the perspectives, they indicate the existence of a heterogeneity of theoretical perspectives in the published works and, finally, it is noted that there is scarce literature dedicated to the subject. In view of this, it is believed that these results will be extremely relevant in presenting the challenges that the Mozambican academic community faces in expanding research and consistent intellectual reflections on academic reading and writing, which to this day remain timid in the country.