Practitioner Agency and Identity in English for Academic Purposes

This chapter arises from a larger study investigating how teaching- and researchintensive staff perceive the growing demand for scholarly activities and research output following the recent changes in a Hong Kong self-financed higher education institution (‘the college’ hereafter) transitioning towards a private university. The chapter focusses on the EAP lecturers changing to the ‘research lane’ branching from the teaching track. Research-lane EAP lecturers (‘REAPs’ hereafter) are required to increase research activities and scholarly publications, adding to their teaching, administrative and service roles. The study presented in the chapter reports on how the REAPs, including myself with an autoethnographic lens, reflected on their precarious, complex and liminal identities in the college and critiqued the influence of an increasingly ‘managerial’ institutional culture on teaching and research, in response to the significant changes that they experienced at the personal, collegiate and institutional levels. Such precarity may be considered pertinent to tertiary EAP practitioners, whose institutions leverage the so-called ‘accountability’ and ‘productivity’ in scholarship to advance in institutional rankings or transition into research-intensive universities. The chapter concludes by identifying the REAPs’ coping strategies including claiming scholar identities, seeking alignment and collaboration with the broader academic community and finding meanings of engaging in research in their EAP teaching careers and personal dispositions such as determination, passion and resilience. These attributes can be helpful for EAP practitioners who aim to have more agentive control over how ‘academic research’ and ‘scholarship’ influence their career prospects aside from informing their teaching decisions.