Writing consultations: supporting creative students with academic and pracademic writing

Writing consultations: supporting creative students with academic and pracademic writing Academic writing development in higher education is often framed as a dialogic, developmental practice rather than a remedial service, with writing consultations positioned as spaces that foster students’ agency and choice as well as disciplinary awareness. As part of the writing centre tradition, writing support is understood not as the transmission of fixed norms but as a collaborative process through which students negotiate interdisciplinary conventions, meanings, and identities. However, in creative disciplines such as architecture, where multimodality, hybridity, and flexible genre practices are central to writing processes, conventional models of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and/or writing consultations struggle to account for the complexity of students’ writing practices. This raises critical questions about how academic writing is conceptualised, and supported in discipline-specific contexts that sit at the interdisciplinary intersection of arts and science drawing on academic, practitioner and creative influences. This Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) research project investigates the academic writing practices of undergraduate architecture students in the UK, addressing a significant gap in English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) provision for creative disciplines. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), academic literacies theory, and ethnographic methodologies, the study employs a textographic approach to analyse student dissertations in terms of structure and texture while also incorporating an ethnographic interview and texts collected from ethnographic site study. This research explores architecture students' language choices (linguistic and multimodal), including macrostructure, Thematic progression and image-text relations. Findings reveal diverse dissertation structures: genre-based such as traditional simple, traditional complex, topic-based, and a combination structure, i.e. ‘TopGen’ alongside creative macroTheme naming conventions. Findings also suggest prevalent patterns in terms of texture such as unmarked topical Thematic choices, zig-zag (Rheme > Theme) Thematic progression as well as varied and creative use of images. This study emphasises the importance of contextualised, constructively aligned, and collaborative English for Academic Purposes pedagogy, proposing English for Pracademic Purposes (EPP) as a potential and innovative framework. Implications for EAP and/or writing consultations practice include recommendations for ESAP curriculum design, genre-based instruction, and interdisciplinary collaboration between EAP and Writing Centres practitioners and subject specialists.