LITMIR.BIZ

      Preface

      This book focuses on the nexus of language, disciplinary content and knowledge communication specifically at taught post-graduate (TPG) or Masters level. It aims to consider this nexus from the perspective of the multiple actors who are enmeshed in the consequences of the economic, cultural and ideological forces of Higher Education’s current push for internationalisation. In addressing this interplay, I suggest the need for a greater synergy between language and content experts. I also suggest that change needs to be implemented through policy rather than on an ad hoc basis by individual teachers and that this involves a change to institutional educational and academic cultures. Therefore, it is a call to action for English for Academic practitioners to find a way out of the silo of their own centres and work to assert influence over the wider context in which they work.

      The book emerged as the result of a scholarship project that was funded by the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence (LITE). The focus of the project was around exploring the significant roles language plays in shaping discipline specific knowledge and understanding. The specific ‘research’ question then became: How do taught postgraduate tutors and students experience the intersection of language and disciplinary knowledge communication. What impact does this have on their identity?

      As an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioner ‘operating on the edge of Academia’ (Ding & Bruce, 2017) the time and space to engage in scholarship around teaching and learning afforded by a Fellowship in LITE was an unprecedented opportunity. It enabled me to investigate questions that had troubled both myself and my colleagues for several years and to move from a place of guessing and knowing experientially to being able to gather evidence and a deeper understanding of what EAP should, or at least could, look like within my own context. It also placed me in the often uncomfortable position of being a somewhat accidental scholar, finding myself drawn into a different field of academic endeavour whilst trying to maintain my own strong identity as an EAP teacher.

      This is a book that begins and ends, therefore, in practice. The focus throughout is on the practice of teaching and learning, on understanding the barriers and enablers to that practice within a particular context. Any theorising around this works to feed into future practice within the same context but can also be extended out from the specific to the general. As such, the outline of the project and introduction of the case study and participants comes prior to any theoretical review. I draw on multiple theories to then help explain the themes I see arising from the data and understand how this might be usefully used to impact on future teaching and learning practices. EAP practice, by its very nature, crosses numerous disciplinary and theoretical thresholds, depending to some extent on the students we are working with. By necessity, then, the EAP practitioner needs to have a broad working knowledge of a range of epistemological and ontological paradigms. Some of this is to enhance, develop and explain our own practice; some is to enable us to work within and across the disciplines of our students with a degree of confidence. This is what makes our work both challenging but endlessly fascinating. It is what makes our work shift from an epistemological to a praxiographic reality in which our knowledge becomes practically enacted in our interactions with students and colleagues.

      As an EAP practitioner, the main theories I draw on as I work to understand the role that language plays in the taught postgraduate curriculum are from the broad field of language teaching and Applied Linguistics. I thus view some of the data through the lens of genre and discourse analysis, of Academic Literacies and Critical EAP. However, I extend beyond EAP, and consider whether the issues raised can be understood in terms of Threshold Concepts (Meyer & Land, 2003, 2005) and of curriculum design more broadly. I also draw

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