A decolonial approach to EAL academic writing education in the GenAI era

This exploratory case study examines how a decolonial approach can inform the design and implementation of a GenAI-mediated EAL academic writing course. Conducted at an English-medium university in China, the study followed Chinese first-year students across a seven-week course using background surveys, two rounds of interviews, screen recordings, and drafts. The course foregrounded ideological awareness, agency and authorship, critical evaluation, multilingual meaning-making, and contextual ethics. Findings show that students increasingly recognized GenAI's linguistic and epistemic defaults, treated academic legitimacy as situated rather than fixed, exercised selective control over GenAI use, and verified outputs through comparison and source tracing. They also used Chinese and English strategically and became more aware of Anglocentric knowledge patterns and policy-related ethical tensions. The study shows how a decolonial approach can be operationalized through sustained curriculum design, while emphasizing that broader institutional and policy transformation is necessary to support more inclusive EAL academic writing education in the GenAI era.