Interactional conflicts among audience, purpose, and content knowledge in the acquisition of academic literacy in an EAP course

The issues of authentic context and authoritative ethos are explored throug h a study of a graduate student learning to write for mathematics within th e context of an English for academic purposes (EAP) course. The student fac ed conflicts about audience, purpose, and content knowledge as she was requ ired to write math texts within what she perceived was an inauthentic conte xt, an English as a second language (ESL) course. She questioned the purpos e of the writing tasks as well as why an ESL instructor was teaching her to write for math, and she addressed the conflicts by writing for the instruc tor's discourse community and expectations, rather than her own, to earn a grade for the course. The text the student created was thus inauthentic wit hin her own discourse community and lacked her voice of authority. These fi ndings question the validity of EAP courses and raise several issues, espec ially in terms of the transferability of skills from EAP to content courses .