I provide an overview of approaches to writing referred to as 'academic literacies' building on broader traditions, such as New Literacy Studies, and I draw out the relevance of such traditions for the ways in which lecturers provide support to their students with regard to the writing requirements of the University. I offer three case studies of the application of academic literacies approaches to programmes concerned with supporting student writing, in the UK and the USA. I briefly conclude by asking how far these accounts and this work can be seen to bring together many of the themes raised at SIGET conferences - including academic literacies and its relation to genre theories - and express the hope that it opens up trajectories for future research and collaboration of the kind they were founded to develop.
Academic literacies; student writing; genre theories