A study of the writing tasks and reading assigned to undergraduate science students at a South African University

Based on a questionnaire to academic staff, this article examines the reading and writing tasks assigned to undergraduate science students at a South African university. The article finds that although academic staff in science value clearly written and well-organised writing, few see it as their task to induct students into this literacy. Instead emphasis is limited to a large degree to the ability to express relationships mathematically. The article confirms previous findings that the laboratory report is the most important genre of writing assigned to science students. It finds that textbooks make up the bulk of the reading assignments. The laboratory report has many similarities with the research article, a key genre in science, but very few research articles are assigned as reading, representing a mismatch between the most prominent genre assigned as reading (textbook) and the most frequent written tasks assigned (laboratory report).