There are several researches about the process of teaching and learning writing in basic education. However, in Brazil academic writing hasn't received the deserved attention yet. In this article, some elements that are intrinsic to the written production conditions of students in undergraduate course offered by one university will be analysed. Bakhtin's conception, in which the control of a genre is seen as a social behavior, associated with an ethnographic approach, constitute the main theoretical reference to this study. Approaching the text ethnographically means to treat it as a feature or as an element from a social situation, which includes the values, the rules, the meanings, the attitudes, as well as the models of behavior of the participants that take part in the interaction. The conclusion is that the commitment of the university with teaching and learning academic writing requires researches about the linguistic skills and competences, and also about the foundations and strategies that allow us to rebuild the principles and beliefs that have contributed to the construction of students' relation with academic literacy practices often considered 'shy', 'deficient', 'inadequate', and 'tense'.
Academic literacies; writing; teaching and learning