Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11 (2012) 17–25

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Journal of English for Academic Purposes

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Academic literacies: Providing a space for the socio-political dynamicsof EAP

Joan Turner*

Centre for English Language and Academic Writing, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE 14 6NW, UK

Keywords:Academic literaciesProofreadingInternational EnglishEmbedded values

* Tel.: þ44 207 919 7440; fax: þ44 207 919 7403E-mail address: j.turner@gold.ac.uk.

1475-1585/$ – see front matter � 2011 Elsevier Ltddoi:10.1016/j.jeap.2011.11.007

a b s t r a c t

This article highlights the potential of academic literacies as a theoretical framework forEAP, encompassing not only work on texts, but the wider, socio-political, geopolitical, andinstitutional contexts and practices in and with which EAP operates. An academic literaciesapproach foregrounds social practices, and one particular practice, that has become socio-politically and ethically sensitive with regard to student writing in English in thecontemporary university is that of ‘proofreading’. The article looks specifically at thereception of students’ writing by professors in the humanities and social sciences, and theambivalent and contestatory role that proofreading plays within this.

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1. Introduction

In this article, I foreground the potential of academic literacies as a theoretical framework for what I’m calling the socio-political dynamics of EAP. A focus on the socio-political dynamics of EAP situates its pedagogical work within a wider contextof institutional politics, policies, and practices, as well as the geopolitical context of English more generally. This has much incommon with the social practice perspective of an academic literacies approach. An academic literacies approach has foundresonance with many EAP practitioners, not least for its oppositional stance to a ‘fix-it’model (Lea & Street, 1998) of the workthat we do. Indeed, it is as a reaction against this model and similar perceptions that Lillis and Scott (2007) see the bottom-up,practitioner-led emergence of academic literacies. As they state, it comes from:

. predominantly teacher-researcher recognition of the limitations in much official discourse on language and literacyin a rapidly changing higher education system.(Lillis & Scott, 2007, p. 3)

They cite, as an example of the pervasive deficit discourse, an article from The Independent in 2006, whichwas reporting onthe outcome of research by the Royal Literary Fund (Davies, Swinburne, & Williams, 2006) into student writing. The headlineran:

University students: They can’t write, spell or present an argument(The Independent, 24/05/06)

This deficit model for students has deleterious effects also on perceptions of the role of EAP practitioners, who are seen assorting out the problems. The perceptions regardingwhat needs to be done to improvewriting apply as much to internationalstudents as to home students. Given the alreadymarginalised institutional position of EAP, it is difficult to change perceptions,

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and so in such a socio-political climate, it becomes all the more necessary to have a strong and capacious theoreticalframework within which to contextualise the work. It is my contention that academic literacies provides this framework andthat the socio-political dynamics of EAP in higher education, whose scope is wide and ever-changing, can draw on its framingto theorise varied and contingent issues as they arise.

2. Academic literacies as theoretical framework

The theoretical model for academic literacies comes from the New Literacy Studies, which includes work in different socialcontexts, such as schools (Gee, 2007); everyday literacy practices in the community (Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic, 2000); aswell as cross-cultural approaches to literacy (Street, 1993). In their key text introducing an academic literacies approach, Leaand Street (1998) outlined three conceptual models: a ‘study skills’ model; an ‘academic socialisation’ model; and an‘academic literacies’model. Crucially, this latter preferred model had the capacity to include, or subsume aspects of the othertwo models, rather than work only oppositionally. It is this sense of academic literacies as an overarching framework, withinwhich to embed a focus on the myriad processes and practices associated with reading and writing in contemporary highereducation, which I find particularly useful.

While the lens of academic literacies research has been predominantly focused on the identities of student writers and thedisciplinary contexts in which they write (Ivanic, 1998; Lea & Stierer, 2000; Lillis, 2001), it has in recent years become muchmore multi-faceted. For example, Lea (2004) has slanted it at the relationship between writing and learning in highereducation, showing how this has been relatively neglected in course design. Lea and Stierer (2009) have looked at highereducation as a site of workplace literacy. Here, they highlight the range of writing practices that academic staff are engaged in,emphasising their workaday writing rather than only scholarly writing and publishing. Lillis and Curry (2006, 2010) bycontrast, have moved to a global focus, describing and assessing the practices and politics of publishing in English, asexperienced by non-Anglophone scholars.

My lens is focussed on the cultural norms and values within which academic literacy practices in contemporary highereducation institutions operate. These circulate unobtrusively in academic culture, but maintain a readily available judge-mental climate (see further in Turner, 2011a). Long established and therefore easily taken for granted, such norms and valuesare seldom scrutinised or viewed as potentially subject to change. In relation to academic writing, they operate largelyaccording to the assumptions of what Street has called the ‘autonomous’ model of literacy (Street, 1984). In the highereducation context, this model might be summed up as: if they can think well, they canwrite well, and vice-versa. I would liketo problematise the ready-made ease with which this broad assumption operates, and do so below in my discussion ofacademics’ reading students’ texts. First of all, I’d like to further clarify my own position within the academic literaciesframework.

3. Academic literacy or academic literacies

The question of whether to use the singular or plural version of this research field is of particular interest. In their recentbook on Academic Writing in a Global Context, Lillis and Curry (2010) conflate them as follows:

While traditions and nomenclature vary, the phrase ‘academic literacy/ies’ is increasingly used to refer to a socialpractice approach to the study of the range of academic literacy practices associated with academic study andscholarship, with the writing of students at university level attracting the largest part of research inquiry to date(Lillis & Curry, 2010, p. 21)

In an earlier discussion, Lillis and Scott (2007) looked at how the singular or plural form was used in the titles of threedifferent textbooks. They found that the epistemological stance with which one or the other grammatical form might beexpected to align, e.g. with a unified or pluralistic conception of knowledge, did not in fact match up. The plural form couldindicate a somewhat programmatic teaching of existing conventions within uniform overall assumptions, while the singularfrom, specifically in a book by Thesen and van Pletzen (2006), researching the South African context, brought to bear theassumptions of a social practice approach. This book is entitled ‘Academic Literacy and the Languages of Change’, and accordingto Lillis and Scott exemplified a critical ethnographic approach, pitching what was conventionally privileged in the academiccontext against the available resources and perspectives of students, and lending voice to those latter perspectives.

While much research in New Literacy Studies has developed from Street’s polarised opposite, namely ‘ideological’modelsof literacy, developed and elaborated through ethnographic research in different social and cultural contexts, I haveemphasised the ideological in the often taken for granted ‘autonomous’model, which prevails in the academy (Turner, 1999,2011a). In other words, the assumptions and expectations of academic literacy have arisen in a particular intellectualhistorical culture. Within such a framing the singular appellation ‘academic literacy’, that is, one among other social literacies,is apposite. Nonetheless, when ‘practices’ is appended to form a plural noun phrase, as in academic literacy practices, thisacknowledges the multiplicity of events and processes, as well as kinds of interaction between tutors and students, andamong students, that can occur around reading and writing. Thus a sense of diversity of practice across institutions anddisciplines is also relevant. Nonetheless, I don’t think that the use of ‘academic literacies’ to suggest writing in differentdisciplinary discourses, as it seems to have been taken up by some practitioners in the EAP field, conveys the theoreticalnuance of academic literacies as a research paradigm. Therefore I would like to make the distinction between academic

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literacies as the theoretical research paradigm, and academic literacy, in the sense of being a specific social and culturalpractice with established norms and values, as the object of research.

4. EAP and academic literacies

As in the dichotomy between two approaches set up as the basis for discussion in this special issue, Lillis and Scott (2007)and Lillis and Curry (2010) identify the distinction between social practice and textual approaches to literacy, as epistemo-logically and methodologically key. As Lillis and Curry put it:

literacy as practice rather than textual phenomenon is a key epistemological and methodological move in NLS [newliteracy studies], which explores a wide spectrum of literacy practices of human endeavour.(Lillis & Curry, 2010, p. 19)

However, the editors of this special issue of JEAP caution against an oversimplification of this polarisation, where SFLrepresents the textual focus, and suggest that both academic literacies approaches and SFL can include a text and practicedimension. I tend to concur in this position. Lillis and Scott position EAP within the textual approaches camp and associate itwith what they characterise as an ‘identify and induct’ approach (Lillis & Scott, 2007, p. 14). While this neat, alliterativeformulation chimes recognisably with the EAP enterprise, and with the academic socialisation model identified by Lea andStreet, it perhaps unnecessarily detracts from the rigorous text-analytical work that can usefully go into the identificationpole, not to mention the hard pedagogical labour, and perpetually elusive nature of induction, should this ultimately even bedeemed desirable. Arguments against ‘acculturation’ or ‘accommodation’ are never far from the pedagogical interface here,see for example (Allison, 1996, 1998; Benesch, 1993; Pennycook, 1997).

I have no wish to deny the pedagogical potential of text-centred analysis in EAP. Research highlighting how particularfeatures are commonly used in a particular discipline or context can be very useful, especially if used sensitively and notprescriptively. Suchworkwould include that of analysts working in different traditions, for example, Charles (2011); Harwoodand Hadley (2004); Hyland (1994, 2000); Nesi and Gardner (2006); Woodward-Kron (2002, 2007); Woodward-Kron andJamieson (2007); among many others.

5. The socio-political positioning of EAP

The text and pedagogic focus of EAP is not the whole story however. It is important also to take into account its insti-tutional positioning as well as a reflective, critical stance to its ownpractices, as in for example Benesch (2001) and the paperspresented in the JEAP special issue of 2009, edited by Benesch (2009). In their elaboration of a social practice perspective, Lillisand Curry (2010) state the following:

. a social practice perspective usefully takes the analytic focus outwards, as it were, from text to context, .(Lillis & Curry, 2010, p. 21)

It is in such an outward moving trajectory, highlighting the space at the interface between EAP and the wider culturalcontext of higher education, its assumptions and expectations, that I’m positioning the current article. At this interface, themarginalised institutional positioning of EAP, as well as the dominant norms and values of higher education withina particular intellectual cultural tradition come to the fore. For example, I have questioned the stance of taking for grantedwell established rhetorical values, such as clarity and concision, by showing their rootedness in the power relations aroundepistemology and cultural politics in the specific Western intellectual tradition of the European Enlightenment (Turner,2011a).

My specific concern in this article is not so much with the dichotomy text v. practice, but rather with practices around thetextual. In this way, by highlighting one of the poles but showing its relevance as a focus for the other, the dichotomy itself isdisrupted. In other words, there need not be any oppositional dichotomy. There is scope for a kind of synergistic spiralwhereby a focus on social practice feeds back in to an awareness of textual practice. At the same time, the vicissitudes ofmeeting the requirements of conventional textual practice, for example, point up the need to scrutinise and re-evaluate orcritique those conventional expectations. They need not be treated as ‘givens’. In this spirit, I scrutinise the norms andexpectations surrounding the reading of students’ texts, as they are voiced in relation to the notion of ‘proofreading’ bya range of professors in the humanities, social sciences and visual arts.

6. An academic literacies approach to the practice(s) and perceptions of proofreading

The issue of proofreading may seem an unlikely candidate for academic literacies research. It seems on the face of it tosuggest a simple, routine, necessary but unimportant, textual procedure. EAP students are usually told to make sure theyproofread their work before handing it in, and as such, it is an important part of time managing an assignment through thedrafting process to submission. Beyond that, however, it doesn’t feature as a major consideration of pedagogic practice. Toshow a concern for proofreading may also connote a moralising, prissy, approach to, or commentary on, texts. Here, thesociolinguistic connotation is with the attitudes to language use exemplified by prescriptivists such as Fowler (1926) andGowers (1954), see also discussion in Bex (1999) and Turner (2011b). However, in the contemporary context of international

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higher education, proofreading has come to signal more than its face value textual practice. It constitutes rather a prob-lematic pedagogical and ethical space, with tentacles stretching into a number of different academic literacy practices in theacademy. These include: the inter-relationship between students and the academic readers of their assessed texts; theinstitutional role of English Language support, usually carried out by EAP staff in higher education institutions; theengagement of students with their texts; the assumptions of autonomous learning (and writing); and the ethics of writingand assessment.

One increasingly visible practice, which brings the social and commercial dimension of proofreading to the fore, is theproliferation of notices in institutional corridors, offering proofreading and/or editing services. This brings with it fears, atleast among EAP practitioners that this is not in the best interests of students, and may indeed be exploitative of them. Suchfears, along with other concerns raising the negative educational, and ethical, impact of external proofreading, featureregularly on the BALEAP1 mailbase. Discussions usually begin when an EAP centre is asked to provide such a service, andwants to know what others do.

Researchers have also begun to research the practices and concerns of people acting as proofreaders, whether voluntarilyor for payment, notably Harwood, Austin, andMacaulay (2009) and Harwood, Austin, andMacaulay (2010). The issue has alsobeen commented on in both the UK and other ‘inner circle’ (Kachru, 1988) venues of international higher education, inrelation to student academic writing and expectations regarding the roles of those supporting its development. This includeswork by Scott and Turner (2008); Turner (2010, 2011b) in the UK; Cogie, Strain, and Lorinskas (1999) and Myers (2003) in theUS; Spolc (1996); Woodward-Kron (2007) and Woodward-Kron and Jamieson (2007); in the Australian context.

In their work on ethics and integrity in proofreading, Harwood et al. (2010) define proofreading as ‘third-party inter-ventions (that entail some level of written alteration) on assessed work in progress’ Harwood et al. (2010: 54). I would agreewith this definition of proofreading as a contemporary academic literacy practice. However, my concern is also to look behindthe practice and explore why it has become prominent as a service, why it is deemed necessary by students, and whether it isdeemed necessary by academic staff, and if so what measures they undertake in its fulfilment. So my underlying researchquestions include the following:

1 BAL

What are the cultural norms and expectations, which make proofreading desirable or necessary?Why has the practice become such a marketable commodity in contemporary higher education?How openly is it discussed as an issue?What are the conceptual conflicts surrounding it as a practice?

Situating proofreading then in the wider context of assumptions, expectations, and distribution of responsibilities, aroundstudent writing, is to view it more in terms of its symbolic significance, in terms of what it says about academic values,academic norms with regard to the reception of language use, what is overt and what is covert in this respect, and what itmeans in relation to English as an international language and its role as the sole medium in which students’ writtenperformance is assessed, regardless of their linguistic backgrounds. This marrying of underlying values and norms, with thepractices both of proofreading as intervention, and the underlying norms and values which encourage it or perceive it to benecessary, shifts the focus from the practice of proofreading per se to one of theorising its context of operation, and it is mycontention that academic literacies provides the necessary theoretical framework.

7. The research project

The aim of the wider research project onwhich this article draws, was to see what different stakeholders, with an interestin student writing, felt about proofreading in general. The stakeholders were the students themselves; academic staff; andEAP practitioners. The project was entitled ‘perspectives on proofreading’ and was awarded a grant by the British Academy.The qualitative research methods deployed included one-to-one semi-structured interviews with academic staff and somestudents; focus groups with students; and a thematic analysis of mailbase discussions, notably postings to the BALEAPmailbase in the Autumn of 2007. These three constituencies yielded three very different discourses, discussed further, andmainly in relation to the student focus groups, in Turner (2011b). To characterise briefly, what was prominent in the students’focus group discussions was an overwhelming sense of anxiety over getting the writing right, and what was unexpected forme was the extent to which students focussed on finding proofreaders for their work. There is a strong culture of networkingon this issue, including between universities. As one student from Taiwan put it:

Writing essays is of course the most difficult task for overseas students here according to my experience. I don’t know. the first thing for most of my friends, either Korean or Japanese is: we have to find proofreaders, cheap andprofessional and we always share the experience fromwebsites, and your friends’ friends and even if she is in [namesuniversity town on the other side of the country] you will email her ‘Do you have any proofreaders for me?’ [FocusGroup Recording, 21/10/2008].

Against this sense of necessity and energetic search for proofreading, what I want to explore here are the attitudes andapproaches of professors with regard to the nature of proofreading and how they relate to it when reading students’ work.

EAP is a professional forum for EAP issues, originating in the UK, but open to international membership (www.baleap.org.uk).

J. Turner / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11 (2012) 17–25 21

8. Data collection

The data explored here comes from semi-structured interviews with professors in a range of disciplines in the humanities,visual and performing arts, and social sciences. Specifically, I will analyse the findings from six interviews, carried out by theauthor over a period of nine months, where the topic was specifically oriented to proofreading. The interviews took place inone-off sessions, at a time and place convenient to both parties, usually in the office of the interviewee. The spread of theinterviews over such a long period was not ideal, but necessary as the author did not have specific research leave, and thebusiness of pinning down professors is not easy. The choice of professors as opposed to lecturers in general, was deliberate, toensure wealth of experience, possibly across institutions, and in varying capacities, such as external examining, and possiblyto reveal any perceived changes over time. It was also considered that such interviewees would be a good match for thesemi-structured interviewmethod, as its potential open-endedness would allow them to runwith their ideas as they arose, asit were. By the same token, such informants were unlikely to be short of ideas or immediate associations. This chimeswith theuses deemed appropriate for the choice of research methodology in the methodology literature, for example Holstein andGubrium (2004); Mason (2002).

With permission, the interviews were audio-recorded, and initially transcribed by a secretarial agency. The interviewsthemselves ranged from 45min to one and a half hours. The author then read the transcripts while listening to the interviews,and was able to make changes, fill in most gaps, based on having been present at the interview, and having an idea of whatwas said. Most of the interviews were interrupted, either by phone calls or by students knocking at the door, but the processgenerally flowed smoothly.

The main structuring questions were:

1. What does ‘proofreading’ mean for you.2. Do you ever proofread your students’ work?3. What kinds of writing do your students’ have to produce?4. Do you ever feel hesitant about drawing attention to the language aspects of students’ work?5. Is there a hierarchy in expectations of work produced at different levels from BA through to PhD?6. Do you ever read work on-line?7. Do you ever ask your students to have their work proofread or edited?8. To what extent do you think that a degree of tolerance is exercised in relation to students writing in English as an

international language?

In keepingwith the process of semi-structured interviews, not all of these questions were asked directly, and not strictly inthe same order. This was mainly because as interviewer, I took my cue fromwhat the informant had said, and probed furtheras relevant, or did not ask a specific question because it had effectively been dealt with in a previous elaboration. I wasconcerned to minimise my own input in order to maximise the free flow of ideas from the interlocutors, and so tended not tointerrupt, signalling by backchannels, that I was attending to what was being said. The face to face nature of the interviewsalso helped in this regard.

9. Analysis of findings

The interviews yielded particularly rich data, far beyond what at face value the topic might be expected to yield. This wasbecause the informants automatically gave examples of events, mentioned particular instances of problems posed instudents’ work, went into greater detail of what was expected in written work as a whole, and related the issue to the wideracademic context. In addition, some interesting themes emerged which were not directly targeted in the questioning. Neitherall of the themes indicated by the structuring questions nor all of the themes which emerged, can be discussed here.

The first question functioned mainly as an opener, intended to get the ball rolling, and was not always asked, especially inthe later interviews where I felt it was no longer necessary. This was because most of the answers were similar. At its mostsuccinct, the response was as follows:

Proofreading would be the final stage prior to actually sending something to print in a nutshell. [Prof. 2, Semi-structured interview recording, 31/01/2008]

When asked whether they proofread their students’work, most informants, while often contextualising or reformulatingin some way, reported that they did. For example, one exchange went as follows:

Informant: Do you mean do I look very carefully at every single word when I’m marking it?Interviewer: Yes.Informant: Absolutely. Yes. I think in the subject, given that it’s an English degree, or English-related, I’malways lookingto alert students to problems they are having. OK, if it’s just a few typos, that’s one thing but I’m always looking to alertstudents to problems they are having with punctuation and so forth by combing, . by reading the text carefully. It’sonly part of the marking process to read it carefully but I can’t resist marking it up . as I go [laughs] [Prof. 1,semi-structured interview recording, 24/01/2008].

J. Turner / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11 (2012) 17–2522

When prompted for specifics as towhat wasmarked up, Prof.1 went on to characterise what students needed to be alertedto as follows:

Spellings, possessives, punctuation, I guess we all know in the business. These are some of the irritants. Punctuation inparticular has grown to be quite a serious issue I think, in the sense that it’s become very, very ubiquitous.

With so-called ‘home’ students in mind, that is students with English as L1, he gave this further elaboration of thepunctuation issue:

Well, it’s the habit of trying to string sentences together around commas, um, the sense that . quite a few of thestudents really don’t have a conception of colons and semi-colons.

Another informant characterised proofreading as follows:

. at a technical level, I would see proof reading as being about making sure that all those irritating minor errors areexpunged from the text. [Prof. 3, semi-structured interview recording, 22/5/2008].

The affective discourse of annoyance at the encounter with such errors, revealed in words such as ‘irritating’ and‘expunged’, where the choice of ‘expunged’ seems particularly vehement, pervaded the discourse of my informants. It wasapparent also in a discussion about assessment, and the motivation of the reader, when Prof. 1. spoke of: ‘nagging issues ofpresentation that as it were dampen the enthusiasm.’

One prominent theme, which emerged in relation to the initial questioning on what constituted proofreading, was thehierarchical distinction between proofreading and editing. As Prof. 3 put it, without prompting:

And I would distinguish between that and editing . yes I would distinguish that from being an editor, which hasa much more interventionist role in the meanings and the way in which the text conveys its meanings. [Prof. 3]

While this distinction is one which is likely to be shared by EAP practitioners, it was somewhat differently inflected fromthe perspective of the disciplinary experts interviewed here. At a different point in the interview, Prof. 3 elaborated on thedistinction as follows:

I think a lot of proofreading can be done by a generalist expert on language, so somebody who has a very goodunderstanding of grammar, and grammar usage and so on, and conventions of colons and semi-colons.well that kindof personwill be very useful in preparing the text for publication. An editor may do that as well but they also may havea much more profound understanding of the field under discussion and make suggestions which are to do with theexpression of certain points or developing certain points or emphasising a certain point.

While not explicitly stated, there is more than a hint here that the differentiation extends to the delineation of roles betweendisciplinary expert and, as it might be, an EAP practitioner. This rather negatively perceived role distribution is one that has beenfoundelsewhere in the literature. Forexample,Woodward-Kron (2007) cites anemail froma facultymember toa languageadvisor:

I have few concerns regarding the content of her project. My only concerns are grammatical – and [the student] is wellaware that she needs to add ‘the’ to most sentences. Your review is to ensure that this aspect is covered.(Woodward-Kron, 2007, p. 255)

Aswell as signalling a territorial boundary between roles and responsibilities, themapping of the territory is constituted interms of content and grammar. Similar dichotomies of form and content, or argument and expression, were readily drawn onby other informants in my data. One said:

But generally I would understand proof-reading as the content all being ok in a piece of work, and just correcting anysort of typing errors, or that sort of small form area. You know, not the content. [Prof. 4, semi-structured interviewrecording, 10/06/2008].

However, scale was also an issue here. Several interviewees referred to the amount of form issues or proofreading errorsthat they encountered as a particular problem. It was also one which had different consequences from instances in whichthere were only a few ‘typos’ or errors noticed. In the following extract, after admitting to proofreading students’ work,correcting ‘all small grammatical and punctuation mistakes that I find’, the professor quickly qualified this as follows:

Unless they are so numerous that it defeats any coherent reading of the text. I mean, I think that the problemwith text,which is full of those kind of proofreading errors, they are so distracting that it makes it very difficult to read the largerargument. So in my mind it is very important that they are got rid of because they can disguise bigger issues in theconstruction of the argument. [Prof. 3]

10. Tolerance for English as an international language

One other theme that was broached in the questioning, which I want to look at here, was that of tolerance for English as anInternational Language. In general, there was an appreciation of the difficulties facing international students, and a toleranceof the kinds of mistakes they made. For example, one informant said:

J. Turner / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11 (2012) 17–25 23

So there is a kind of sentence structuring. If it’s an East Asian, they might just miss out the “the” or something like that,as they do. [Prof. 5, semi-structured interview recording, 23/7/2008].

There was also a general willingness to work with students at an individual level, especially in the context of PhDsupervision, to reach clarity on what they were trying to say. For example, there were comments such as the following:

if you think somebody’s got a relatively developed understanding, but it is actually the way they are writing it downthat is quite hard to follow, you can work with that always. You can see that very clearly in some people’s writing interms of certain kinds of regular recurring grammatical mistakes and you are just like, that’s fine. [Prof. 6, semi-structured interview recording, 11/11/2008].

However, the degree of tolerance was also bound up with howmuch of the correction the supervisor was prepared to do.For example, when the interviewer followed on from Prof. 50s statement about ‘the’ above, with:

‘And you don’t mind that?’

the response was:

No, I don’t mind that, but I’ll just tell them to get it corrected. I’mnot going to correct it myself. I’ll correct some of it, butif it’s consistent, I’ll say “You must check this right throughout the thesis.” [Prof. 5]

There was a general consensus among the professors interviewed that they would correct a certain amount, but then theywould expect the students to learn from those corrections, andmake sure theywere consistently applied throughout the text,as mentioned in the previous quote. Tolerancewas however diminished by frustration, when the reader was overwhelmed bythe amount of language errors, or the persistent presentation of work with numerous errors. This was voiced particularlystrongly by Professor 6, where in a hierarchy of enhanced expectation from undergraduate through to PhD students,increasing levels of frustration were experienced:

At a masters and PhD student level I have much higher expectations and I will get increasingly frustrated if I thinksomebody hasn’t taken the care to proofread their work. And I would take it much more seriously, as a sign that theyare either not taking responsibility for their work or almost not showing respect for the reader. You know, to presentwork that is not kind of ., I am thinking of one particular case, where I think, there is no sentence here that isgrammatically correct! [Prof. 6]

The awareness of a PhD thesis reaching an ultimate, and crucial, point of needing to be thoroughly proofread, was stronglyfelt by Professor 3. It was also clear that the supervisor was not the person to do this.

But I think you get to a certain point in reading a completed text where you have to tell a student this is still not perfect,I’mnot reading it again because I can’t read anymore. I’m telling you that this has got to be corrected and then you haveto presume that the student goes away and does it, and if they don’t do it then they fall foul of the examiners. [Prof. 3]

This point of perfect text as it were, is extremely significant in cultural terms as what is expected of academic writing at thehighest level. It is also highly ambivalent. On the one hand, it constitutes a point of no return for the student. It is theirresponsibility to submit such a text. On the other hand, despite all the possible accolades of strong, interesting, and originalresearch, the student him or herself is not capable of meeting the requirement.

11. Academic literacies as ethical space

The question of what then should happenwhen the above point is reached is not directly addressed. It seemed to me thatwhile the issues were apparent to my informants, there was an institutionally and culturally influenced failure of will toaddress it. Nobody seemed to have a ready solution to the dilemmas of responsibility and labour involved in preparing thetext, written in international English, for PhD submission. It was somehow the student’s responsibility, but no questionsasked. It was rather amurky space inwhich external examiners lurked as amenacing presence, and students, while their textswere thoroughly negotiated and interrogated in terms of their argumentation, were ultimately left to get on with a perfectlyproofread submission as best as they could. No wonder they employ external proofreaders. No wonder that this is also nota panacea.

As interviewer, I had a strong sense of wariness and hedging around the issue of students having their texts proofread. Theprofessors knew it was a problematic area, but were ambivalent about it, as in the following response:

. Or I suggest they get a proofreader, and so then they will say, do you know any proof-readers, and I say no I don’t.[Prof. 6]

They were somehow reluctant to concede it as a substantive issue. They would restrict it as a problem to only a fewstudents. For example:

I think I have only said it once or twicewith some, I mean you’re giving this interview now, and there is one personwhois proving very problematic because the degree of the problemwith the writtenwork is quite severe and she is going toget a proofreader . [Prof. 6]

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It was interesting that when the discussion moved into the ethical, at my prompting, therewas some surprise and a searchfor reasons for an ethical dilemma. This was in marked contrast to postings on the BALEAP mailbase in relation to proof-reading, where ethical issues loomed large, and were multi-faceted. Professor 3 said:

I think we would have ethical dilemmas if you thought it wasn’t their ideas.

However, a further example was given whereby some hours were set aside for PhD students to consult with ‘specialadvisors’. These were people with particular knowledge of a specific theorist, where the supervisor didn’t feel happy passingan opinion. This professor admitted tonot really knowingwhat happened in those sessions, but suggested the possibility that:

So I suppose you could say that willy nilly that provision does get used by students for editing purposes. [Prof. 3]

Therewere also somemisgivings expressed about the possible role of the proofreader, and notablymarked hesitations andfalse starts in how they were expressed, which to me were symptomatic of unease and defensiveness:

but there is a bit of me that is kind of likewell, but you know the proof-reader is just supposed to kind of smooth out theEnglish a bit andmake sure,.they are not supposed to. Somehow or other the proof-readers have got to not think asit were, they have just got to say what you’re saying. It is a bit tricky that line. [Prof. 6]

This professor has put it in a nutshell: the proofreader is supposed not to think. Indeed, professional proofreadersmaywellbe happy with that description. All they respond to, as with the electronic monitoring devices in our word-processingprogrammes, is the text and the rules and regulations they are working with as regards textual presentation. However, asEAP practitioners well know, working with the language of L2 students is not like this. One change leads to other changes.Whole paragraphs may need to be re-ordered. There is then the likelihood, that an external proofreader could havesubstantial involvement in writing the text.

12. Conclusion

In the contemporary context of international higher education, proofreading is like a Gordian knot, which it is impossiblesimply to slice through. It is incumbent upon an academic literacies perspective to put such contemporary dilemmas of highereducation practice into the spotlight, to frame them as ethical, socio-political spaces, where norms, such as those for thesubmission of PhD theses in English, where the demand for pristine prose is as relevant for the international L2 as for theexperienced L1 writer, well versed in its discourse, are questioned. As an ethical space, it is not one where easy practicalsolutions are sought, but where the myriad issues of expectation, responsibility, time, and underlying rationales are openlydebated, and nothing is taken for granted.

An academic literacies approach for EAP means widening its scope to include the socio-political dimension of itscontext of situation, and not restricting its focus to student engagement with texts, albeit this has to be a major preoc-cupation. In this article, the socio-political dimension was represented by an analysis of academics’ reception of studenttexts, pointing up a concern for the perfection of written texts, and the expectation of a smooth read. While previousacademic literacies research has focussed on academics’ perceptions of problems with a lack of structure or argument instudent writing (Lea & Street, 1998), this research has brought the expectation of accuracy at word and sentence level intorelief. While this expectation operates with a lower level of importance assigned to it than reading for content, mirroringthe hierarchy between sentence level and discourse in applied linguistics, the fact that it is nonetheless important needs tobe emphasised. As was shown in examples here, ‘content’ is not communicated without form. They are intricatelyenmeshed.

There is another context in which the hierarchy operates and that is between the ‘subject specialist’ and the EAP prac-titioner. There is an implicit assumption that the interventions of the latter would be at the level of proofreading, at that ofgrammar, spelling and punctuation, and not at the level of argument. This is of course what EAP practitioners themselveswould dispute in terms of it being a diminution of their professional capabilities. Arguably, the hierarchy needs to be dis-rupted and amore horizontal alignment put in place. Such an alignment would have implications for EAP pedagogy as well asfor the value system at play in the reception of student writing, and in the distribution of roles allocated to its development. Itis at least in part due to these issues not being explicitly voiced and negotiated institutionally, that has given rise to the socio-commercial practice of proofreading as an additional element in the transaction of texts between students and their academicreaders.

I would hope that this research around perceptions of proofreading exemplifies and emphasises the socio-politicaldimension of EAP theory and practice, which the editors of this volume have signalled in their discussion of critical EAP.Its complexity also reinforces the need for different kinds of research to take place within this dimension. I would advocatethat it is the theoretical framework of academic literacies that provides the space for such socio-political and ethical issues tobe debated.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to express my gratitude to the British Academy for the aid of a small grant (SG-46939) in gathering and transcribingdata.

J. Turner / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11 (2012) 17–25 25

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Joan Turner is Director of the Centre for English Language and AcademicWriting at Goldsmiths, University of London. As well as academic writing and EAP,her research interests include intercultural communication. She is the author of Language in the Academy, 2011, published by Multilingual Matters.