I am a fan of vignettes, and was pleased to see that they were being used in this book. They have the advantage of enlivening as well as concretely contextualizing a particular situation, dilemma, or argument. In this book, they are attached to pseudonymous individuals at varying levels of responsibility in the field of EAP delivery in UK higher education. They are clearly selected to illustrate the range of EAP practice and include situations such as an in-sessional tutor developing a specific course for students at a particular level in a specific discipline; a pre-sessional course director aiming to improve how student feedback is taken into account in ongoing course design; and a head of department having to make choices over what to prioritize, given budget constraints. All are highly relevant and likely to be recognizable to most EAP practitioners, not only in the United Kingdom. For ELT practitioners hoping to move into the world of EAP, the book therefore provides a useful overview of the contexts in which the practice-based issues arise. The issues themselves are not always restricted to EAP but are germane to the wider field of English language teaching. They include concerns with learner autonomy, giving feedback, course evaluation, and teacher cognition, often in the interests of reflexive practice and teacher self-development, or the enhancement of the learning experience of their students.

International higher education is a contemporary social space or 'contact zone' (Pratt, 1991, 1992) in which students and staff from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds interact, and in which assumptions and expectations accrued from differing pedagogical cultures and practices play out. The sociolinguistic and pedagogic consequences of this interaction in multifarious sites globally are therefore often characterized by unpredictability. This creates a dynamic of the 'always unexpected', of contingency and improvization, rather than regularity in pedagogic interaction. The landscape is fluid rather than neatly bounded and the flow of interaction often choppy, disrupting interlocutor expectations. As a result, it makes sense to align the analysis and interpretation of such practices theoretically with explorations of contemporary cultural and social processes more broadly. In analyses and argumentation around broad topics such as globalization or late modernity, it is notable that conceptual metaphors of fluidity and flux dominate such theorizing. Examples include Bauman's (2007) notion of 'liquid life', Clifford's (1997) use of 'travel' as a theoretical metaphor and Appadurai's widely influential uses of 'mobility', 'flows', and 'scapes' (Appadurai, 1996).

At the heart of an Academic Literacies approach is a concern with "transformation" and the "transformative."But what does this mean?How is "transformation" to be understood, and what does it look like when using an Academic Literacies lens to investigate and design writing practices in the academy?In this section, the book's editors each offer a perspective on these questions-but without a desire to close them down.We recognize that individual practitioner-researchers will define and work with the notion of transformation somewhat differently depending on their/our particular institutional and/or disciplinary positions and the specific questions they/we ask.An examination and elucidation of this contextual diversity is, indeed, one of the main aims of this volume. thereSa lilliS: toWardS tranSformative deSignAs a teacher, researcher and participant in contemporary academia I am involved in both working with(in) and against powerful conventions for meaning making and knowledge construction.I am committed to exploring what it is that prevailing academic conventions for meaning making have to offer-and to whom-and what it is they constrain or restrict.My concern (based on many years of teaching and researching) is that we-as teachers, researchers, writers, policy makers-may often adopt prevailing conventions, including those surrounding which specific Design rests on a chain of processes of which critique is one: it can, however, no longer be the focal one, or be the major goal of textual practices.Critique leaves the initial definition of the domain of analysis to the past, to past production.(Kress, 2000, p. 160) The question of design-or what I am referring to as "transformative design" in Andrew: So it's an excuse for, like, the government not intervening in causes of ill health, isn't it?Andrew's aha! moment isn't the end of the story however: I observed how much of the argument that had emerged collaboratively and antagonistically through the peer to peer discussion dropped out of the writing the students subsequently did (see Mitchell, 1995).What accounted for this disappearance?Was it control over the medium, the medium itself, the fact that the writing would be read and assessed by the teacher as part of working towards a public exam, a resultant reluctance to take risks?These kinds of question about "translation, how meaning gets moved, or does not …", about "intersubjectivity, how separate individuals come to conceive, or do not, reasonably similar things …" make clear that it was not possible thinking Jacobs, C. (

Edited transcript of recorded discussion, February 2007 Mary Scott, as Chair

In this chapter, we undertake four different kinds of analysis towards an understanding of intercultural communication in action. The action is situated in a context where intercultural encounters are common, namely contemporary higher education. Furthermore, the intercultural encounters are discipline specific. They take place in one-to-one tutorials in fine art, in a UK institution. The lecturers are British and the students are Japanese. In the first place, the tutorial interactions are analysed in terms of the tutorial as genre; second, certain recurring exchange types within the tutorial are isolated as examples of what we call epistemic principles, namely those underlying principles which motivate teaching and learning in the discipline. Third, and following on from the discourse analytic perspective of the students behaviour, students' own accounts of why they were behaving as they were, and how they understood the tutorial interactions, are explored in a number of retrospective, semi-structured interviews. The stimulus for those interviews were video-recordings of the students tutorials, which had taken place one year earlier, and they were carried out in Japanese. This afforded a fourth kind of analysis, namely the extent to which the students had adapted to or resisted not only the interactional norms of the tutorial, that is behaving like students in a UK context, but also the disciplinary norms which lay behind those interactions.

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

This book takes a critical look at why issues of language in higher education are routinely marginalized, despite the growing internationalization of universities. It examines the norms of academic writing in the context of wider cultural practices and power relations and suggests the transformative potential of the intercultural dynamic in the contemporary academy.