Enabling Disciplinary Voice in Postgraduate Students’ EAP Writing: Evaluating Practices of Assessment for Learning

It is often a challenge to teach EAP courses to mixed-discipline student groups, as the academic conventions of disciplines differ, but the course materials are often limited in their coverage of topics. Although constraints will remain, the challenge could be mitigated by granting students more agency in assessment tasks, conforming to recent calls for assessment for learning. This chapter will evaluate the practice of allowing students to choose any topic in summative assessments in postgraduate in-sessional EAP courses at XJTLU, accompanied by other practices of multiple feedback opportunities and provision of model texts. We argue that, despite challenges, such practices can enable students to develop their disciplinary identities amidst general EAP conventions and social factors surrounding the assessments, based on evidence from student writing samples, student feedback on the course, and instructors’/markers’ views. Through this practice and evaluation, we also hope to unpack the complexity of disciplinary voice in EAP contexts, as it involves the cultural clashing of disciplinary conventions, EAP conventions, student identities, and EAP teachers’ reconstruction of students’ disciplinary voice, which deserves more attention in teaching and research.