Hidden challenges of tasks in an EAP writing textbook: EAL graduate students' perceptions and textbook authors’ responses

English as an Additional language (EAL), with a plethora of materials for teaching academic writing at the graduate and research levels, which typically takes the form of textbooks. This study brings attention to an underrepresented aspect of EAP research—EAL students' reactions to textbook materials. Here one of the more influential graduate-level academic writing textbooks has been Swales and Feak's Academic Writing for Graduate Students (AWG) (2012). What so far has been largely lacking in the story of AWG are the voices from the students' side of the desk, apart from those reported by instructors and reviewers. Using a semi-structured format, I interviewed eight EAL graduate students and brought their opinions to the co-authors for responses. The students in this study evaluated AWG's genre-oriented tasks in mostly positive terms. However, not all of them benefited equally from its tasks. Students' reflections in interviews revealed hidden challenges to its genre-oriented tasks that have not been previously published nor disseminated in the EAP research community. This study therefore offers some useful implications for genre-based writing instruction and research, not just for AWG but also for many other textbooks supporting EAL writers.