English for Specific Purposes and Academic Literacies: Eclecticism in academic writing pedagogy

Academic Literacies and English for Specific Purposes perspectives on the teaching of academic writing tend to be positioned as dichotomous and ideologically incompatible. Nonetheless, recent studies have called for the integration of these two perspectives in the design of writing programmes in order to meet the needs of students in the increasingly diverse and shifting landscape of academia. The aim of the present paper is to reflect on how this theoretical integration could be put into practice. Drawing on the design of a research-based writing workshop for postgraduate anthropology students, we argue that rather than a ‘hybrid’ model of writing pedagogy, a theoretically grounded but eclectic approach is needed in order to respond to students’ personal, local, and disciplinary contexts.