Academic literacies: Providing a space for the socio-political dynamics of EAP

This article highlights the potential of academic literacies as a theoretical framework for EAP, encompassing not only work on texts, but the wider, socio-political, geopolitical, and institutional contexts and practices in and with which EAP operates. An academic literacies approach foregrounds social practices, and one particular practice, that has become socio-politically and ethically sensitive with regard to student writing in English in the contemporary university is that of ‘proofreading’. The article looks specifically at the reception of students’ writing by professors in the humanities and social sciences, and the ambivalent and contestatory role that proofreading plays within this.

► Academic literacies as a theoretical framework for the socio-political dynamics of EAP.
► Examples of how Professors in Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines respond to student writing.
► What the notion of ‘proofreading’ masks and opens up.
► Need for change in institutional perspective on written academic English.