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Education (HE) landscape in which they now operate, one in which there is a marked propensity towards the marketisation of education (Molesworth, Nixon & Scullion, 2009, p. 278). These neo-liberal tendencies have contributed to a drive to promote HE study opportunities in the UK to international markets, the success of which has led to international students being termed ‘the economic lifeblood of many universities’ (Green, 2016, in Hyland, 2018, p. 388).


As many of these students have a need for EAP either before or after starting their degree programmes in order to enable them to tackle the complex ‘cognitive, social, and linguistic demands of specific academic disciplines’ (Hyland & Hamp-Lyons, 2002, p. 2), the demand for EAP practitioners is great, and they can be seen as fulfilling an important, if not pivotal, role in terms of facilitating access to degree programmes through helping students develop their academic language and literacy, thereby being instrumental in providing a greater pool of international students eligible to join and potentially succeed in their degree programmes. In this way, a student’s level of academic English proficiency in educational institutions can be regarded as functioning as a kind of gatekeeper for their achievement and progression (Tosky-King & Scott, 2014), most specifically seen in EAP contexts through the ‘gatekeeping function’ of pre-sessional programmes with regard to admission onto degree courses (Rolinska, Guariento & Al-Masri, 2016, p. 16; Smithwick, 2014, in MacDonald, 2016, p. 107).


If EAP can itself be regarded as serving a gatekeeping function in some of its iterations, can this analogy be extended to encourage us to view the EAP practitioner as


Aleks Palanac


a gatekeeper? If interpreted as meaning that EAP practitioners have the remit to actually set or challenge EAP entry requirements for degree programmes, the analogy of gatekeeper would be misleading, on the whole. However, if interpreted in the sense that EAP practitioners have the remit and skill to judge whether or not a student has met the required level to progress onto their degree programme, the analogy of gatekeeper would seem to reflect this. Furthermore, the gatekeeper analogy could reasonably be applied to the choices that EAP centres make as to which students to accept onto their programmes at the outset (Palanac, 2019). Indeed, Benesch (2001, p. 130) highlights the fact that there are often numerous barriers facing students from non-elite backgrounds, and that not only EAP centres, but also practitioners, face a choice (in reference to ‘non-elite’ students) as to whether to use their position to include or to exclude such students from their institutions. In these respects, the gatekeeper analogy would seem to confer a not insignificant degree of power to the EAP practitioner within the workings of a neo-liberal university. However, there is a collection of analogies which have been applied to EAP and EAP practitioners which would appear to divest them of power and status, casting them instead into a peripheral service role. These include that of ‘butler’ (Raimes, 1991), ‘handmaiden’ (Hyland, 2006), ‘technician’ (Morgan, 2009) and even ‘Cinderella’ (Charles & Pecorari, 2015). That EAP and its practitioners are often regarded as adopting a ‘butler stance’ was first suggested by Raimes (1991, p. 243), inasmuch as, in many institutions at the time, they could be seen as support staff serving the academic community from


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