English for Academic Possibilities: the research proposal as a contested site in postgraduate genre pedagogy

Abstract

The EAP debates of the 1990s have challenged TESOL practitioners in postgraduate research contexts to reconsider the assumptions underpinning their teaching. As coordinator of an Integrated Bridging Program for international research students in a conventional Australian university, I have primarily seen my role as investigating the contextual expectations, as well as the text features, of the target research genres required in my teaching. In pursuing the first of these goals, I surveyed faculty research supervisors, asking them to prioritise the particular features they expected to see in a successful ‘research proposal', as this is the compulsory assessment task for each research student's initial probationary period. I also invited them to add personal written comments about their priorities. I then interviewed seven experienced supervisors representing all University faculties about the same issues. The results demonstrated an overwhelming concurrence of criteria for success in the research proposal across the University. Perhaps even more significantly, however, supervisors' personal responses presented in writing and in interview suggested a recurring reading of the proposal not in terms of document features but in terms of the student who wrote it, constructed either as the discoursally instantiated writer/persona, or even as the embodied student as subject. For me, the implications of such assessment practices provoke a reconsideration of genre-oriented pedagogy and strongly support a critical rather than a purely pragmatic EAP in research contexts.