A shift from handmaidens to enlightened waiters


their position outside academia, with ‘no intrinsic subject matter’ to draw upon and ‘no academic process of their own’. This butler analogy set the scene for Hyland’s (2006, p. 34) widely-cited depiction of EAP as being regarded as ‘handmaiden to the “proper” disciplines’, being seen as a pragmatic and mercantile activity conducted by practitioners blissfully ‘untroubled by theoretical issues or questions of power’. This pragmatism, coupled with a commonly- held perception of EAP practitioners as hands-on fixers of student deficiencies (e.g., Stevenson & Kokkin, 2007, p. 47 in MacDonald, 2016, p. 108) has led to the analogy of ‘technician’ (e.g., Morgan, 2009; Hadley, 2015) being applied. Echoing the other analogies, the fourth in this group, suggested by Charles and Pecorari (2015, p. 38), allots the EAP tutor ‘Cinderella status’, on account of their perceived lower status and salary, and typically fewer opportunities to conduct research. As noted above, what these four analogies have in common is the implication that the function of EAP and its practitioners is largely limited to that of adopting a practical service role, and that, from their position on the periphery, they facilitate the activities occurring elsewhere in the university which are of real value, those which form the true ‘essence of the university’ of which EAP practitioners are generally not deemed to be a part (Ding and Bruce, 2017, p. 204). The analogies imply that, though this role is important in a fashion, to the extent that it oils the cogs of the hidden mechanisms of the university, those adopting it are invisible and largely unacknowledged.


While this reading may still be applicable to practitioners in many institutional contexts, it is important to note that more


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recent commentators (e.g., Harwood, 2019; Hyland, 2018) have questioned the generalisability of these analogies to all incarnations of modern-day EAP, with Hyland (2018, p. 389) going so far as to term them ‘overblown’ and ‘outdated’. He notes that EAP has developed into a far ‘more theoretically-grounded and research-informed enterprise’, with advances in genre analysis and the use of concordance data rendering it a valuable branch of knowledge in its own right within the field of Applied Linguistics.


There is some indication that the extent to which such developments may have affected EAP practitioners and the ways in which they view themselves and are viewed by others is likely to be highly variable (e.g., Taylor, 2019); certainly, there has not been a widespread transformation of practitioners in the field in this respect overnight. Returning briefly to the Cinderella analogy in relation to transformations, whilst it is true that, if we were to playfully follow it to its logical conclusion, this analogy would see her undergo a dramatic transformation to be recognised in all her glory by the end of the story, Cinderella is ultimately the object of this transformation rather than the subject responsible for bringing about her own metamorphosis, which potentially puts her at the mercy of external forces. That such a depiction is not entirely satisfactory when applied to EAP practitioners is evident in the work of Taylor (2019), who interviewed 17 EAP practitioners in the UK and found that some were actively challenging traditional assumptions about their positioning in relation to that of those with formal academic roles within their institutions through what Moore (2017, p. 263) has termed ‘subversive negotiations of face’, which are small actions or discursive acts


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