This work, inspired by ethnographic guidelines, is the product of an action research developed in the classroom and aimed at deepening an understanding of the literacy practices of students entering a law course at a private college in Belo Horizonte. It is a study that is based on the purpose of not only understanding the concerns and complaints of these students about writing and reading in the academic sphere, but also intervening in their literacy practices with a view to rethinking them in order to promote a critical and dialogical experience with writing and reading. In this endeavour, in line with a socio-historical and discursive approach to reading and writing, language is seen as a complex human phenomenon, markedly dialogical, founder of intersubjective relations. With this view, taking reading as a dialogical activity, based on the work of the counter-word, literacy practices are conceived here as spaces of exchanges between subjects, of production of meaning and of construction and transformation of identities.