Graduate students' genre knowledge and perceived disciplinary practices: Creating a research space across disciplines

•Focus on the rhetorical strategies used by multilingual graduate students from different disciplines.•In-depth qualitative approach involving three data sets.•Students' formal and rhetorical genre knowledge of genre is linked to perceived disciplinary practices.•Differences between the sciences, social sciences and humanities are identified.

Disciplinary differences in academic writing have been addressed in applied linguistics from multiple perspectives. This article focuses on the rhetorical strategies used by multilingual graduate students from the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities to create a research space in academic introductions. Adopting an in-depth qualitative approach, we draw on three data sources: graduate learners' analyses of model texts, their reflections on their own writing strategies, and a textual analysis of their introductions, to better understand how genre knowledge is connected to perceived disciplinary practices. Our findings indicate that the students' formal and rhetorical knowledge of genre is linked to their perception of knowledge-making practices in their respective disciplines. We discuss pedagogical implications for EAP professionals working with students from different disciplines in multilingual contexts.