EAP WRITING SUPPORT FOR THE RESEARCH PROCESS: QUESTIONS AND EMERGING ISSUES
EAP WRITING SUPPORT FOR THE RESEARCH PROCESS: QUESTIONS AND EMERGING ISSUES

Summary/Abstract: As researchers continue to face pressures to publish their work in English-medium journals, the need for EAP writing specialists to provide support for this process continues to be of increasing importance. We have come quite far in our ability to help doctoral students navigate their way through their degree programs and become full participants in their chosen own fields. Successes aside, however, we must always question whether and how we are meeting their writing communication needs. This involves deepening our understanding of the research writing challenges faced by the new generation of scholars, which are becoming progressively more complex. This complexity can be attributed to a number of factors such as the students themselves, the increasing importance of interdisciplinary research, emerging research genres, and new audience with whom researchers are expected to engage. Adding to this complexity is the reality that the writing mentoring doctoral students receive may be inadequate. This paper discusses these issues and proposes that EAP writing instructors can play an invaluable role in helping doctoral students and other research writers gain an enhanced set of knowledge brokering skills that will allow them to transport and translate their research across many boundaries. In doing so, we can also model the kind of mentoring approaches that the current generation of scholars can enact to support the research writing of successive generations of scholars.

• Details
• Contents