Christine B. Feak

Tensions between the Old and the New in EAP Textbook Revision: A Tale of Two Projects

At first sight, revising an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing textbook seems a simple matter. All that appears to be needed is to update example texts, incorporate recent research findings, and fine-tune the tasks and explanations in the light of practitioner experience. However, it soon becomes clear that little is simple, given multiple stakeholders in the revision process. Instructors who regularly use the textbook have their favorite tasks and topics (with different instructors having different preferences), and so they want these to be retained. Then there are instructors who have become tired, as the years pass, of ‘the same old stuff’. Publishers, who are, of course, profit-oriented, want a product that is a marketable new edition of a successful previous edition, rather than a completely new or new-looking book. Finally, the author has expectations since, as most materials writers know, the impetus of revising often turns into an impetus for rethinking, often quite dramatically. In this chapter we discuss these tensions between the old and the new via two case histories: the radical transformation of English in Today’s Research World (Swales and Feak, 2000) into a series of small, narrowly focused volumes; and the more conservative preparation of a third edition of Academic Writing for Graduate Students (Swales and Peak, 2012). We explore, in particular, the issues related to addressing the concerns of stakeholders, who may have competing interests. The two projects reveal that at times in the publisher-author-end-user relationships critical asymmetries can arise, which may redirect an author’s desired plans. At other times, when the publisher, the author, and the end-user embrace a similar vision for a textbook revision, the relationship may be more flexible, resulting in greater author autonomy in designating the content and matters of style.

Academic Communications and the Graduate Student

In recent years, there has been increasing recognition that many graduate students, especially those in Ph.D. programs, need some kind of structured assistance with their writing. At the University of Michigan, for example, the graduate school has recently initiated a series of annual workshops on this topic. We know from P. A. Prior’s (1998) rich studies of graduate seminars how complex the writing processes for graduate students can be, and all of us involved in graduate education are aware that doctoral students are now expected to assemble some kind of publication list before they graduate. Not surprisingly, the first population targeted for assistance consisted of nonnative speakers of English (Casanave and Hubbard 1992), and there have been important developments over the decade in this area (e.g., Dong 1998). For several years now, the University of Michigan’s English Language Institute has been offering a linked sequence of two advanced writing courses (“Research Paper Writing” and “Dissertation and Proposal Writing”) for nonnative speakers from across the university. These courses are voluntary, attract graduate credit, and are supported by individual consultancies. Major course components include the conference abstract, the conference poster, the literature review, and the dissertation abstract. There are also two units that deal with the “interstitial” genres that undergird research writing processes: requests, reminders, submission letters, CVs, applications, recommendation letters, and the like. Here is an extract from Swales and Feak 2000 on reminders: