Enabling disciplinary voice in postgraduate students' EAP writing: Evaluating assessment practices

It is often a challenge to teach EAP courses to mixed-discipline student groups, as the academic conventions of different disciplines differ, but the course materials are often limited in their coverage of topics. This challenge looms larger in a postgraduate context, as students need to display an advanced level of disciplinary knowledge through writing. However, although constraints will remain, the challenge could be mitigated by granting students more agency in assessment tasks. This chapter will evaluate the practice of allowing students to use any topic of their choice in summative assessments in postgraduate in-sessional EAP courses at XJTLU. We argue that such a practice can enable students to express their disciplinary identities amidst the general EAP conventions, and thus is more beneficial for students’ development of academic writing compared with assessments that have fixed topics. Evidence for this includes student writing samples, student feedback on the course and instructor/markers’ views. We will also reflect on the existing challenges in such a practice, including difficulty in helping students develop their own topics and in marking and standardisation.