Jg. Hansen, Interactional conflicts among audience, purpose, and content knowledge in the acquisition of academic literacy in an EAP course, WRIT COMM, 17(1), 2000, pp. 27-52
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
.