EAP Practitioners Transitioning into Scholarship Writing – Simon Webster

EAP Practitioners Transitioning into Scholarship Writing – Simon Webster – S.J.Webster@leeds.ac.uk
With the introduction of the Teaching Excellent Framework, there is an increasing focus on research-led teaching and learning in UK HE institutions (Gourlay and Stevenson, 2017). The British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes’ professional competencies framework aligns with this agenda through the inclusion of scholarship as an instrument for professional development (Martin, 2014). Where scholarship is introduced in employers’ descriptions of EAP practitioners’ professional activity, however, there can be institutional expectations of written outputs since these often serve institutional purposes of establishing the quality of scholarship and its impact (Wood and Su, 2017).
Research in other contexts (e.g. Tran et al., 2017) suggests that the transition into writing for publication repositions practitioners and, as with the undertaking of scholarship more broadly in EAP (e.g. Ding and Bruce, 2017) can be seen to have profound professional identity implications. The research currently being undertaken investigates the beliefs of practising EAP practitioners towards scholarship writing in a UK HE setting. It explores the value placed by practitioners on the activity of producing written scholarship outputs, the challenges presented and the identity shift accompanying the transition process. In addition to contributing to the sparse EAP practitioner identity literature, the findings will also have implications for teacher development interventions and institutional change management.

References

Ding, A. & Bruce, I. 2017. The English for Academic Purposes practitioner: Operating on the edge of academia. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Gourlay, L. & Stevenson, J. 2017. Teaching excellence in higher education: critical perspectives. Teaching in Higher Education, 22, pp.391-395.
Martin, P. 2014. Teachers in transition: The road to EAP. In: Breen, P. (ed.) Cases on teacher identity, diversity, and cognition in Higher Education. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Tran, A., Burns, A. & Ollerhead, S. J. S. 2017. ELT lecturers’ experiences of a new research policy: Exploring emotion and academic identity. System. 67, pp.65-76.
Turner, R., Brown, T. & Edwards-Jones, A. J. I. J. F. A. D. 2014. ‘Writing my first academic article feels like dancing around naked’: research development for higher education lecturers working in further education colleges. International Journal for Academic Development. 19, pp.87-98.
Wood, M. & Su, F. 2017. What makes an excellent lecturer? Academics’ perspectives on the discourse of ‘teaching excellence’ in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 22, pp.451-466.