Undergraduate student academic writing in English-medium higher education: Explorations through the ROAD-MAPPING lens

Abstract

Since the turn of the millennium, the internationalisation process that higher education institutions have engaged in worldwide has resulted in an unprecedented expansion of English-medium study programmes. In this regard, the academic writing produced in such contexts reveals that an increasing amount of student work, from classroom assignments to MA dissertations and PhD theses, is written in English. Against this background, this paper introduces the ROAD-MAPPING framework (Dafouz & Smit, 2016, 2020) as a comprehensive analytical tool which can help (re)frame student academic writing in multifaceted and holistic ways. Drawing on sociolinguistic and ecolinguistic theories of language (Blommaert, 2010; Fill, 2018), student academic writing will be discussed as a social practice intersecting with other relevant dimensions at the core of English-medium education (EME). Using the School of Economics and Business Studies in a large Spanish university as a case study, questions regarding the type of writing assignments students are developing, as well as how English is conceptualised by the faculty involved and how internationalisation impacts on certain writing practices will be raised and discussed using the ROAD-MAPPING framework. The article closes with reflections and implications for the development of specific EAP pedagogies in these EME programmes.