Scaffolded Practice Assignment Writing to Support Emergent Disciplinary Literacies

Where academic literacies are understood as situated social practices, effective academic literacy support needs to reflect the disciplinary and institutional specificity of the practices. However, the institutional separation of academic literacy teaching from disciplinary subject teaching, typical of UK universities, creates significant obstacles to the enactment of these principles. One response to this separation suggests academic literacy support in the form of embedded collaborations between EAP practitioners and disciplinary lecturers. This paper reports on two complementary pieces of research investigating one such embedded academic literacy intervention, that of a collaboration between EAP practitioners and TESOL lecturers scaffolding the writing of a practice assignment. The findings for the two studies strongly suggest that the academic literacy intervention facilitated student academic literacy development. The intervention model could also be seen to draw effectively on the respective areas of expertise of disciplinary lecturers and EAP practitioners with positive consequences for the learners and for the disciplinary lecturers and EAP practitioners themselves.