The transition of EAP practitioners into scholarship writing

Abstract

EAP practitioner scholarship is a key element of EAP teacher professional development (Martin, 2014) and the credibility of EAP as a discipline (Hamps-Lyon, 2011; Ding & Bruce, 2017). It also allows a professional knowledge base to develop and pedagogical advancements to be made (Borg, 2013). Whilst the BALEAP community values and promotes such scholarship (Gillett, 2021), limited research has been conducted into EAP practitioner beliefs about the written outputs of this activity (Davis, 2019). In particular, there is an absence of research exploring the process by which EAP practitioners begin their scholarship writing. This paper presents a case study of an EAP setting in which a workload allocation has been introduced for scholarship. It explores the motivations, challenges and professional identity implications of scholarship writing for EAP practitioners in this context. The findings suggest that the institutional workload initiative facilitated a cultural shift in which scholarship writing became more normalised and academic identities of EAP practitioners were strengthened. The inclusive institutional understandings of scholarship were also seen to promote practitioner agency in overcoming perceived challenges to the production of early written scholarship outputs.