Journal of English for Academic Purposes | 2019
‘From doing to being: Process type as indication of purpose in academic business reports’
Abstract
Abstract This Researching EAP Practice paper focuses on academic writing for Business using Halliday s (2014) concept of register, with a focus on the ideational field of student business report analyses. Set in the context of an EAP support module for International Business students, the paper investigates how changes to assessment tasks and classroom input resulted in Business students representing companies in different ways for different purposes. These differences reflected changes in the overall purpose of the assignment set, with the revised EAP task going from a focus on a company in immediate difficulty (a company report) to an assessment requiring students to apply more abstract disciplinary concepts (an organisation analysis) (Nesi and Gardner 2012:188). This paper shows how subject-specific changes made to EAP tasks can result in changes to the register of student writing, and will be of interest to EAP tutors working with Business students, but also to EAP staff in other disciplinary contexts. This paper also contributes to research into applied and professional disciplines more broadly, and suggests that tasks in applied subjects should not necessarily always aim to be purely ‘real-world’ and congruent in their scope.