Perceptions of writing: writing in English for academic purposes (EAP) programs and writing in disciplines

In this qualitative case study, I investigated academic writing in two contexts. The first was writing task designers at an EAP program, the second was the academics in the discipline of Accounting and Corporate Governance. Two participant task designers from each context volunteered their perspectives on the role and function of academic writing in their respective settings. The research questions were: 1) How is academic writing conceptualised in a university direct entry preparation program for business, accounting and economics at Macquarie University’s ELC? ; 2) How is academic writing conceptualised in the discipline of Accounting and Corporate Governance at Macquarie University? ; 3) How are participants’ views about academic writing compared in the two contexts? To answer the research questions, I collected task descriptions, evaluation criteria, task descriptions and follow-up interviews with task designers and unit convenors from the participants. To facilitate data storage and analysis, I used Nvivo 11 for Windows. Drawing on Roz Ivanič’s (2004) theoretical framework, I coded and categorised data into discrete concepts. Analysis of participants’ perspectives reflected core concepts encountered in Ivanič’s framework, although some responses combined discourses separately proposed by Ivanič. Although dominant perceptions on the features of academic writing reflected skills discourse and genre discourse, findings showed that the approaches to writing task design in both contexts are more compatible with social practice, genre and process discourse. There were no signs of skills approaches to teaching writing in the design of writing tasks. I discussed the findings to illuminate potential implications for different stakeholders.