Academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review

In 1998, the paper ‘Student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’ by Mary Lea and Brian Street reinvigorated debate concerning ‘what it means to be academically literate’ (1998, p.158). It proposed a new way of examining how students learn at university and introduced the term ‘academic literacies’. Subsequently, a body of literature has emerged reflecting the significant theoretical and practical impact Lea and Street’s paper has had on a range of academic and professional fields. This literature review covers articles selected by colleagues in our professional communities of the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE), BALEAP the global forum for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) professionals, and the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing (EATAW). As a community-sourced literature review, this text brings together reviews of wide range of texts and a diverse range of voices reflecting a multiplicity of perspectives and understandings of academic literacies. We have organised the material according to the themes: Modality, Identity, Focus on text, Implications for research, and Implications for practice. We conclude with observations relevant to these themes, which we hope will stimulate further debate, research and professional collaborations between our members and subscribers.


Introduction
Mary Lea and Brian Street published their paper 'Student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach' in 1998. This special edition of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education (JLDHE) takes stock of developments some twenty years on. We have collated this community-sourced review of some of the literature associated with the field that has become known as 'academic literacies' using contributions from 17 colleagues (listed below and marked in the text in bold font) from three professional bodies: the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE), BALEAP the global forum for EAP professionals, and the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing (EATAW). Contributors were invited to submit critical reviews of texts listed in our call for papers, or to review alternative, related texts, which they believed would be of interest. The results, synthesised here, represent responses from our three practitioner communities to an acknowledged seminal paper and to the debates and further literature it generated and continues to generate. While a systematic literature review aims for a comprehensive analysis of the literature on a topic in order to identify key findings and research gaps, the purpose of this review is slightly different. As one of the roles of HE is to further the conversation a society has with itself (Bernstein, 2000, p.xx), so our objective here is to further the conversations within and between our learning communities that have arisen from Lea and Street's paper and the responses to it in terms of research and pedagogy.

A collaborative writing process
The community sourcing of material for this paper was an attempt to reflect the views and highlight concerns of our three (related yet distinct) professional bodies and areas of academic practice. In selecting contributions, identifying key themes and synthesising content, we were mindful of the need to balance our responsibilities to our co-contributors with our aim to produce a coherent text. We conducted numerous online conversations and shared many drafts as we juggled these obligations and shaped this papera process that was very much assisted by the affordances of digital writing technologies. Our exploration of fragmentation and reconstruction in producing a multi-voiced text through a layered collaborative writing process reflects a (still relatively new) form of academic authorship where precise attribution is difficult. This process of attempting to write within Lea and Street's academic literacies approach critiques what they term 'study skills' and 'socialisation' models of writing instruction in HE: [T]he models are not mutually exclusive and we would not want to view them in a simple linear time dimension whereby one model supersedes or replaces the insights provided by the other. . . . The academic literacies model . . . incorporates both of the other models into a more encompassing understanding of the nature of student writing within institutional practices, power relations and identities. . . . We take a hierarchical view of the relationship between the three models, privileging the 'academic literacies' approach (1998, p.158).
Some advocates of linguistically informed approaches to writing development (Coffin and Donoghue, 2012;Tribble and Wingate, 2013), have taken issue with this view. In the twenty-one years since its publication the paper itself opened up a rich vein of research and response. One reason for this is that it reframed the way academic writing is discussed and opened up new ways of analysing how students find their disciplinary voices. The landscape in which students study and write essays has evolved in multiple ways, influencing the 'possibilities of selfhood' (Ivanič, 1998) for student writers.
Researchers have documented the accompanying changes in attitudes and values amongst teaching staff, which have not always been positive, and reported on the pressure on teaching staff (Fuller et al., 2004;Wingate, 2006;Riddell et al., 2007;Gourlay, 2009;Ashworth et al., 2010;Cameron and Billington, 2015; Office of Fair Access, 2017).
These pressures in turn have contributed to observed changes in student identity (Eurydice, 2014).
Reflecting how the wide range of responses to Lea and Street's 1998 paper have resonated with our professional communities, we have grouped contributions to this synthesis of reviews into the following themes: 1. Modality: discussions relating to modes of study in HE; for example, the development of e-learning.
2. Identity: processes and practices in identity formation. 5. Implications for practice: in pedagogy and in supporting learning.

Modality
Several of the texts reviewed by our participants develop ideas about modes of study, expression and the construction of meaning, such as in speech, performance and 'elearning'. Some see a contradiction in the early work on academic literacies in that, despite the critical and transformational purposes espoused, a primary focus on traditional forms of written expression is implied and may work to reinforce the privileging of this mode of academic practice. Lillis and Scott (2007), for example, call for a critical approach to epistemology as a fundamental underpinning of academic literacies work, feeding into pedagogyteaching, learning and assessment practicesand strategies for course design.
In her review of Arlene Archer's 2006 paper, 'A multimodal approach to academic "literacies": Problematising the visual/verbal divide', Christina Howell-Richardson points to disciplinary meaning-making as constructed in multi-modal texts and how these 'different semiotic dimensions of representation ' (2006, p.450) both sit alongside and differ from traditional academic writing. Drawing on Kress and Van Leuwen's (2001) theory of multi-modal discourse, Archer's purpose is to enquire into ways in which first year Engineering students from non-traditional backgrounds use visual and verbal modalities to express meanings. The data for Archer's study include written text and posters. Howell-Richardson reviewed this text because it highlights the ways in which students responded to the different affordances of visual images and writing for various communicative purposes. As she states: [Archer's]  The three publications referred to in this section share a concern to direct attention away from a definition of literacy as confined to the construction, by students, of written texts that conform to traditional academic conventions. Rather, they emphasise the need to redefine literacies in multi-modal terms where knowledge is constructed, expressed, contested, and assessed by all members of the academic community. In this way, they demonstrate the enduring power of the academic literacies perspective, as crystallised in Lea and Street's 1998 paper, to provide a generative framework for discussions about practice in pedagogy, research and policymaking.

Identity
Conflicts and tensions in the academic writing environment discussed by Lea and Street (1998) influence the ways in which student writers develop their writer identities. In this section, we bring together four papers that in their own distinctive ways respond to the challenges facing students in the academic writing context and encourage reflection on our current strategies of meeting their increasingly diverse needs. The four articles include: 'Writing and being written: Issues of identity across timescales' (Burgess and Ivanič, 2010) reviewed by Aileen Hanrahan; 'Pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of "dumbing down"' (Haggis, 2006) reviewed by John Hilsdon; '"Fail better": Reconsidering the role of struggle and failure in academic writing development in higher education' (French, 2016) reviewed by Cathy Malone, and 'Threshold practices: becoming a student through academic literacies' (Gourlay, 2009) reviewed by Peter Levrai.
In the same year as Lea and Street's exposition on academic literacies, Roz Ivanič (1998) pointedly argued that writing is an act of identity and this academic writing identity has four aspects: socially available possibilities of selfhood, the autobiographical self of the writer, the discoursal self, and the authorial self. Her theories of identity were further developed by Burgess and Ivanič (2010), where the authors added one more dimension of writer identity (the 'perceived writer') and emphasised that identity changes over time, is multifaceted, and may be unconscious or conscious in its development. Student writers may participate in multiple, and sometimes contradictory, discourses that shape their sense of self, depending on the social spaces they inhabit, which then has an impact on the multidimensional selfhood they bring into these spaces. These change according to different timescales (Wortham, 2003) from sociocultural timescales counted in decades or even centuries (e.g. gender or class identity) through ontogenetic and mesolevel timescales that encompass one's lifespan (e.g. life choices or phases) to microgenetic timescales that concern the lived experience of the moment (e.g. the act of writing itself).
All these identities that persist on different timescales are interrelated and deeply agentive not only are they equally capable of shaping an act of writing, but are also profoundly affected by the writing process itself. Importantly, the construction of writer identity is highly sensitive to the changing times and discourses (Burgess and Ivanič, 2010 (Mann, 2001) into richer kinds of engagement, in order that a much wider range of students might gain access to conventional and established forms of knowledge and power' (Haggis, 2006, p.522;emphasis added). She also questioned the assumption that what is needed is more attention either to learning approaches or styles, or to the provision of more generic study skills support to 'at risk' students. In any case, she suggests, given the very high increase in numbers of students in HE characterised as '"mature", "disadvantaged", "non-traditional", "overseas"', and '[p]erceived as being "weaker" in terms of educational experience and/or ability' (p.522), it would be practically impossible to provide such support. Instead, she argues, those supporting learning should offer 'embedded, subject-specific exploration of different types of disciplinary process' (p.533) and that academics should articulate more clearly what they believe, wish to share through their teaching, and what they expect students to do.
In this respect, Amanda French (2016) responds to Lea and Street's (1998) academic literacies approach by calling on educators to resist 'the obsession with standards and performativity' and instead help students 'to understand that developing into confident academic writers is not a straightforward, linear or automatic process; rather it inevitably involves struggle, conflict and feelings of uncertainty, inauthenticity, marginalisation, exclusion and occasionally, failure' (French, 2016, p.409 (French 2016, p.409-410). French reviews these models of learning and the conceptions of writing in a way that rejects identity implications of personal failure and refocuses attention on 'the institutional failure to meet the increasingly diverse writing development needs that many students . . . might present' (2016, p.410). This attention shift from personal to the institution aligns with the ambition of the original academic literacies work and has been reaffirmed more recently by Lea, who suggests the 'need to reclaim the institutional perspective that was inherent in some of the early work in the field of academic literacies' (Lea 2016, p.88). It is also an argument that is still current across the sector.
French sums up major trends in how writing is supported at university while foregrounding the student experience and acknowledging the difficulty and distress of transition.
According to Malone, this methodological focus offers an antidote to the rampant performativity of UK HE and the mechanistic nature of 'you said -we did' service evaluation. It models careful reflection on actual student experience, recasting failure as opportunity in a way that opens up 'an alternative discourse of "generative failure"' (Harris, 2014;cited French, 2016, p.414). Indeed, in the previously mentioned article, Haggis already suggested that 'it is impossible to succeed in meeting the needs of the range of students now coming into higher education, both in terms of the extent of this diversity and in terms of available resources ' (2006, p.522). Instead, she calls for 'a change of perspective' from the deficit approach to students and refocuses our attention on the principle of treating students as ends in themselves (Mann, 2001). As John Hilsdon put it in his review of Haggis's paper, the interpretation of academic literacies it points to is one that does not simply call for students to (be helped to) learn the language and discourse practices of their subject (important though that is), but to be treated respectfully as participants in the academic community, even as they enter itsomewhat as in the idea of legitimate participation promoted by Lave and Wenger (1991) on an inward trajectory, so that students might feel encouraged and supported not just to acquire relevant practices of the academy but to comment upon them, critique, and even improve them. Reading Haggis's paper is a helpful way into thinking about Sarah Mann's (2001) idea that developing learning in a modern, accessible HE environment requires not transactional and transmission pedagogies but an orientation where students are treated as ends in themselveswith all their rich linguistic and cultural variety being acknowledged in the curriculum and by academic practices. In other words, rather than being objectified as 'learners' to be acted upon, students are to be actively involved in all aspects of HE.
This idea of the development of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) is particularly important when considering how students transition into university, which can be not only an emotionally challenging process that changes novice newcomers into more confident members of the university, but also one that can have a dramatic impact on student identity, something examined by Lesley Gourlay in 'Threshold practices: becoming a student through academic literacies' (2009). As Peter Levrai notes in his review of the article, what particularly stands out in this paper is the critique of the communities of practice when it comes to higher education, particularly in terms of the limited interactions between tutor and student, which problematise the idea of 'mutual engagement' where the novice can learn working alongside the expert. Levrai concludes that this is an area where EAP can play an important role, helping the student through the academic writing process and offering that mutual engagement through formative feedback. It is also an area where collaborative writing assignments can help students navigate new ways of writing, providing a social as well as academic support network, so they can pass through threshold practices together.
While questioning the applicability of the concept of communities of practice to higher education contexts, Gourlay favours the concept of 'liminality', which recognises that students need to engage in threshold practices during their transition and that during this process they may experience emotional destabilisation, uncertainty and ambiguity. Her study shows how writing can be an important aspect of students transitioning into believing they belong at university, which links back to the idea of selfhood as theorised by Burgess regard to 'how knowledge is textually constructed ' (2009, p.189; emphasis in original). The approach could also help students to accept that uncertainty, struggles and even failures are 'a normal part of the academic process, as opposed to indicating a deficit' (p.189), thus limiting the potentially detrimental impact of failure on student writer identity.
Academic writing has always been a key skill for entry into 'the academy'; now, however, in a digital era, the question over academic writing and its relationship to professional writing contexts has further highlighted Lea and Street's (1998)  and who should hold authority to maintain such a concept (Riddell et al., 2007;Shaw, 2009). As Aileen Hanrahan points out in her review of Burgess and Ivanič (2010), with the essay serving as one of the main points of contact with academic staff, in terms of working on drafting, marking and giving feedback on the writing, the essay becomes the cornerstone of where student identity-building through contestation becomes manifest.
Contestation may take the form of engagement with feedback and marking results; with issues about accessing teaching support regarding a particular assignment; or how the reader, in this case an academic, perceives what the writer is trying to achieve in the essay and how that should be judged (e.g. as worthy of academic excellence; see Riddell et al., 2007;Kinder and Elander, 2012).
In this way, Hanrahan compellingly reasons, the essay might be conceptualised as a 'site of conflict', which influences the interactions between the student writer and their intention of becoming a member (or not) of the academybelonging to the traditionally established community of practice. As she continues, this form of analysis presents a particularly insightful perspective on dyslexia, as a particular community of practice (Gourlay, 2009), and other forms of disability/learning disability. For example, Burgess and Ivanič's (2010) model of identity and changes in identity over time might be applied in future research to increase understanding of changes in the conflicts and tensions in how dyslexia and other disabilities/learning disabilities are conceptualised, and how these changes influence identity-building for specific communities.
Application of reasonable adjustments are known to be haphazard (DSAC, 2015), which translates into essay writing and marking being a site of conflict for many learning-disabled students. In many of the research studies cited above they are shown to be contested, which needs further analysis in case studies. Hanrahan demonstrates that conceptualisations of dyslexia, learning disability, disability and reasonable adjustments amongst various stakeholders, and their relationship to identity-building as expressed in essay writing, would benefit from using the Burgess and Ivanič (2010) there is a lack of research on dyslexia in higher education from an academic literacies perspective (Mortimore and Crozier, 2006;Morken and Helland, 2013;Pino and Mortari, 2014;Cameron and Billington, 2015), and more specifically, on dyslexia and identitybuilding mechanisms in academic writing across various sites of conflict.
The authors of the four texts reviewed in this section agree that when it comes to responding to the challenges to student identity as writers, educators should strive for some form of, in Haggis's words, 'richer kinds of engagement ' (2006, p.522). This is contrasted, in John Hilsdon's review, with the still all too common and often alienating student experiences of sitting in lecture theatres not really knowing how doing so will help in producing a piece of workan essay usuallyto demonstrate learning, nor how such activities relate to the 'real world' and what they need to learn about it in order to participate and be empowered in it. We should thus promote activities that involve students in meaningful conversations with academics and each other about how teaching and learning are achieved in the university, both traditionally and now, under new 'mass' conditions and with new technologies. The focus of educators must be on the student experience of learning to write at university while acknowledging the multifaceted, painful, and often messy ways in which this experience influences, and is influenced by, student identity. systemic functional linguistics. The latter two papers form a critical response to the original article and represent a keener concern with classroom practice.

Focus on text
The article 'Exploring notions of genre in "academic literacies" and "writing across the curriculum": Approaches across countries and contexts' (2009)  Similarly, a connection is made with the ethnographic approach to research evident in Lea's work, specifically her focus on the micro-level of practice applied to observing students learning to write through acculturation to norms and conventions. Both Lea and Street are concerned with exploring how issues of power and identity are played out through academic writing at university.
Amell notes the value of genre as a lens through which to explore academic literacies and clarify it as a theoretical frame, evident in the following explanation offered by Russell et al.: Issues of genre are central to the three models of student writing outlined [in the paper] (skills, socialisation, and academic literacies). Each of these models is implicitly associated with a different orientation to the notion of genre. In terms of study skills, genre would be conceptualised as primarily in relation to surface features and form; academic socialisation would be associated with the conceptualisation of genre in terms of established disciplinary norms for communication, given primarily by the texts written by academics within the disciplinary community. The empirically grounded academic literacies perspective is aligned with a view of genre as social practice, rather than genre knowledge in terms of disciplinary communication per se (2009, p.405).
An academic literacies approach highlights the extent of genre variation students are faced with and the 'genre switching' (Scalone and Street, 2006) that they need to demonstrate.
The ethnographic research roots of academic literacies are evident in an analysis that focuses on 'the different interpretations and understandings of genres of the participants of any particular writing encounter at university ' (2009, p.406). Similarly, this focus on unpacking 'micro-social practices, such as "gaps" between student and teacher perceptions of particular writing activities ' (2009, p.414) aligns with this research orientation and a social-practices model of genre, which presents meaning as emerging from the 'relationship between the creation of texts and their associated practices in any particular context . . . [which] vary across disciplines, subjects, fields of study and text types' (p.406). This results in quite a different approach to supporting student writing, which goes beyond general disciplinary concerns or subject focus. Applying the principles of academic literacies to genre involves looking at the 'level of epistemology, authority and contestation over knowledge, rather than at the level of technical skill, surface linguistic competence and cultural assimilation ' (2009, p.400). In practical terms, such an approach implies a more ambitious role for tutors than to simply make disciplinary expectations explicit to students.
As well as clarifying the theoretical positioning of academic literacies, the authors also acknowledge a major criticism that, although practitioner-led, academic literacies tended at this time to be more focused on theory and research than practical applications. This increasing concern with practice became evident in 2012, when two papers were The publications in this section represent an increased focus on practical application of academic literacies principles. They share a common concern with the role of language in learning at university, both as a means to explore disciplinary discourses in fine detail and as a means of honing disciplinary voice. Key questions arise about the extent to which the language of university study and academic expression is transferable across disciplinary contexts and, where differences occur, where power resides to enable, or prevent, resolutionespecially for students who may work across two or more disciplines. This we teach a disciplinary form without inducting students into normative genres? Academic literacies foreground the tensions both in terms of subject positionalities but also in terms of power and the de/legitimisation of cultural practices and ways of knowing. The issue is not whether language is central to meaning making but how explicit focus on the study of form is best positioned.
What [academic literacies] seeks to explicitly avoid is the idea that students first need to learn 'the basics' and only then can be exposed to a pedagogy which leaves space for questioning and change (Lillis and Tuck 2016, p.34 (Lillis and Scott, 2007) and something that has potential to make significant contribution to increased cross disciplinary collaboration.

Implications for research
In Lea and Street's original conceptualisation in the 1990s, the role of academic literacies as an approach to research (alongside a transformative, student-centred pedagogy) was always important. However, the (mis)appropriation and ( issues (e.g. about 'correctness' and appropriacy), which may be taken for granted in a 'study skills' or academic socialisation model, can become subjects for investigation, critique and potential reformulation in research and pedagogy, broadening and validating student identities as participants in academic practice. Disciplinary contexts, cultures and their conventional genres also become subjects for exploration. Furthermore, wider institutional discourses and genres can be subjected to critical scrutiny via ethnographic research in ways that are helpful to the identity-formation of those from diverse or marginalised backgrounds, such as non-native speakers of English. While Harrington notes that the paper is very situated, produced from the UK in the mid-noughties as a response to the deficit model and skills agenda, he feels it remains useful despite progress made to incorporate some of the insights from academic literacies into academic practice since then. What remains true is that the transformational drive of an academic literacies perspective is yet to be widely utilisedand this paper helps to emphasise the vital role students could play in that. both observation of the practices surrounding the production of textsrather than focusing solely on written texts -as well as participants' perspectives on the texts and practices. This ethnographic framing of the study of students' writing connects strongly with, and indeed gives academic credibility to, long standing practitioners'

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interest, in adult and higher education, in exploring and making sense of students' perspectives on academic writing, including challenging the 'taken for granted' (2007, p.11).
Although, as Harrington, Zhang and Cirstea all point out, learning development and EAP practices have taken on some aspects of the student perspective in the years since these papers were written, academic literacies remains an underutilised research and teaching framework, and its transformational power remains as potential for the development of a more inclusive, relevant, and socially just higher education systems and practices.

Implications for practice
The issue of how to support literacy development at university in a way that aligns with the principles identified in Lea and Street's 1998 article has proved an ongoing challenge across the sector, something acknowledged by a number of writers in the field including Lea and Street (cited in Russell et al., 2009; see also Lillis, 2003;. Some note the absence of a clear design model (Wingate, 2012), while Lillis (2008)  In her 2012 article 'Plagiarism and attribution: An academic literacies approach?', Anna Magyar reports the findings of a small qualitative study that explored international postgraduate students' understanding of plagiarism and attribution at a UK university. This paper applies an understanding of academic literacies to both the qualitative research and to the resultant materials' design of a discipline-specific online resource. Magyar identified in her analysis four dimensions to attribution: linguistic, rhetorical, epistemological, and culturally situated practice. The findings were used in the resource design, which was also informed by the complementary approaches to writing pedagogy used by Lea and Street (1998), namely skills, socialisation, and academic literacies. This resulted in four sections: 1) reasons for referencing; 2) identifying sentences that need referencing; 3) paraphrasing; Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, Issue 15: November 2019 26 4) structured holistic practice. What this paper makes clear is the sheer complexity of the process that students proceed through in adapting to culturally situated writing practices and the epistemology of attributable knowledge. She demonstrates how applying an academic literacies perspective offers insight as to what elements of the adaptation to study can be made explicit (through games and quizzes), the implicit process of socialisation students go through (into the language and discourse of the context/subject) and, most significantly, the textual and institutional practices (writing, reading, discussing attribution, note making), which have a deeper impact on personal and social identity.
Thus, in order to not only avoid plagiarism but to understand why it is wrong in terms of authorship in the academic context, it is not simply a case of acquiring skills and following rules, but of cultural, linguistic and epistemological development, which may be highly problematic given the timescale of UK programmes. Magyar provides a lens to critically evaluate adaptation to academic practices of all students, not simply those from diverse backgrounds. She is also quite clear concerning the limitations of online tools used on a simple skills basis in quizzes and drills, demonstrating that they are neither conducive to dialogue nor support development of deeper understanding and re-orientation that is aimed for. The unpacking of the design process and the theoretically informed critique provides a welcome analysis of an arena that learning developers are increasingly working in, that of online materials' design. In doing so, this paper provides a pedagogic framework for evaluating learning resource design.
Gow in his review explicitly connects Magyar's different reasons for plagiarism with theories of epistemological development (Marton and Säljö, 1976;Baxter Magolda, 1992), transformative learning (Mezirow, 1997), and Habermas's (1987) distinction between instrumental, strategic and communicative action in the academic lifeworld (see Gow, 2018). The epistemological development referred to here indicates the complexity of decision-making that underpins the attribution process and affirms the need for a range of resources to help students learn to manage attribution in their work. While at first seemingly straightforward and familiar, Magyar's work critically reflects on the challenges of making the implicit nature of attribution in academia explicit to students from diverse backgrounds.
The remaining papers in this section are concerned specifically with who supports students to become academically literate, what spaces these staff occupy, and what opportunities are available to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries. In her 2005 article 'On being an insider on the outside: New spaces for integrating academic literacies', Jacobs revisits New Literacy Studies' commitment to literacy as a social practice and reexamines some fundamental questions concerning who supports students in learning to write at university. She is clear that academic literacy 'is best acquired by students when it is embedded within the contexts of particular academic disciplines' and that 'students are best inducted into the discourse communities of the various disciplines of study by modelling themselves on "insiders", others who have mastered the discourse', suggesting that disciplinary specialists are best placed to teach disciplinary writing (Jacobs, 2005, p.477). Jacobs scrutinises the expertise of different staff groupsdisciplinary specialists and academic literacy practitioners/language lecturersand critiques their current separation. She is clear that there is a need for disciplinary specialists, 'insiders' to the discourse, to share and teach their tacit unarticulated disciplinary knowledge to their students; she is also clear, however, that they may lack the skills to do this. Jacobs draws on the work of Gee (1990), making the distinction between teaching for acquisition and teaching for learning and his assertion that '"meta-knowledge of the structure of a given domain of knowledge" . . . lies at the heart of teaching' (Gee, cited in Jacobs, 2005, p.480).
Gee emphasises that teaching these separately 'can lead to successful but "colonized" students' (Jacobs, 2005, p.478) in a way that echoes the tension in academic literacies between inducting students into the practices of a discipline while supporting them to critique it. Hewertson, in her review, explains how collaboration enables 'teaching for learning', and details how this is brought about by disciplinary specialists 'viewing the discourses of their disciplines through the eyes of a questioning [academic literacies] practitioner' (Jacobs, 2005, p.480). This collaboration allows practitioners to know 'when and how to scaffold students' growing abilities', and bring their tacit knowledge and understandings of the workings of a discourse within their disciplines into the realm of 'overt and explicit teaching' (Jacobs, 2005, p.484 and 478).
This theoretical framing is a preface to a case study based in a South African university, which explores how 20 academic literacies practitioners and disciplinary specialists integrated academic literacy into various disciplines. Reflecting on the benefits of transdisciplinary working, Jacobs maintains that the project created a new discursive space for collaboration. Hewertson draws out two key recommendations from this article: the need for a community of practice of tertiary educators that transcends the narrow confines of disciplinary boundaries, and the establishment of sustainable transdisciplinary discursive spaces where dialogue and collaboration can take place. This paper highlights the many challenges of collaborative cross-disciplinary working and Jacobs is clear that meeting this challenge may require a redefinition of the role of academic literacy practitioners in tertiary education.
Within the same theme of embedding, Neil Murray and Shashi Nallaya's 2016 paper presents a case study on how universities can better develop students' academic literacies through embedding support into the curricula. Craig Morley in his review explains how embedding is a natural fit for an academic literacies approach given the importance of social context and the discipline specific nature of academic skills. He points out that embedding academic literacies aligns with critiques of extra-curricular, bolt-on support (Wingate, 2006). Murray and Nallaya draw explicitly on Vygotsky's theory of learning to inform their embedding strategy and Morley notes the appropriacy and relevance of Vygotsky's ideas of scaffolding to the design of a structured curriculum that seeks to incrementally develop students' academic literacies.
This practical application of academic literacies to curriculum design was developed in response to the increased diversification of the HE student body in Australia. In this context, Murray and Nallaya emphasise we cannot 'make assumptions' about students arriving at university 'preloaded with the academic literacies they will need' (2016, p.1298); they also clearly identify the institutional responsibility to address this need. This article's case study of academic literacy provision across two subject areas presents a model that had some success in embedding academic literacies into curricula. While this model offers an example of innovative collaboration with strategic impact, Morley places it in context of an increasing number of published case studies showcasing different embedding strategies (Cairns et al., 2018;Hill and Tinker, 2018).
The authors discuss the obstacles to embedding and note the importance of establishing buy-in, particularly amongst academic staff, noting a disconnect between themselves and disciplinary academics, which had significant consequences for their project. Their example illustrates an ongoing challenge to the learning development and EAP sector, highlighting how much work is involved in articulating potential benefits of applying academic literacies principles to our work. The embedded approach adopted in this case Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, Issue 15: November 2019 29 study seems a particularly useful method to evidence long term impact and Morley argues that this paper makes a positive case for the larger potential impact LD/EAP can have through engaging in collaborative curriculum design. He also highlights how rethinking curricula by embedding academic literacies carefully across programmes is one important way in which HE can be made more inclusive and supportive to the diversified student body.
Embedding academic literacies may involve a centrally located disciplinary specialist working alongside subject tutors in the classroom (e.g. Jacobs, 2005) or working with disciplinary subject tutors on curriculum design (e.g. Murray and Nallaya, 2016). focus on the individual student experience, there was an original concern with institutional responsibility for literacy development. Murray and Muller's work in looking at practical applications of academic literacies reasserts this focus on the institutional, rather than personal, level of responsibility and provision.
Murray and Muller consider how to address the needs of international students who, in spite of demonstrating sufficient language to enter university in large numbers, continue to demonstrate serious problems with their academic work and progression. In some ways their case study represents an institutional response to this issue. However, targeting initiatives at international students and delivering these outside of the mainstream teaching programme has led to superficial skills-based approaches to writing development (Lea and Street, 1998, p.169) criticised as effectively apportioning blame to individual students.
While the needs of home and international students are not identical, developing an understanding of academic literacies is a challenge that all HE students face. In spite of the criticisms of remedial services aimed at the needs of ever more specific, discrete student characteristics as unfeasible (Haggis, 2006, p.522), such targeted approaches remain prevalent across the sector. Murray and Muller (2018)  The papers in this section all address the practical challenge of teaching in a way that aligns with academic literacies principles (Lea and Street, 1998). Taken together it is possible to garner if not a design frame, then a few principles for practice aligned to academic literacies:

Mainstreamed and embedded
Although academic literacies emerged from analysis of widening participation, the centrality of literacy development to higher education and rejection of deficit frames suggest that learning and literacy development are relevant to all students and subjects (Lea, 2016, p.89). Similarly, separation of development work according to whether English is a student's first, second, additional, or foreign language are distinctions that have been actively challenged by academic literacies practitioners (Lillis and Tuck, 2016, p.39

Critical and transformative stance
A common theme throughout academic literacies writing is the foregrounding of issues of power and authority evident in language and learning. In practical terms this implies a need to go further than clarifying disciplinary expectations and to engage students in critique, acknowledging the tension between 'being explicit about norms and conventions of disciplines and opening up curriculum spaces for these to be contested' (Jacobs, 2013, p.133). This reflexive critical stance extends to our institutional and disciplinary norms.
Researchers and practitioners in academic literacies tradition assert a commitment to critical intellectual value and purpose of university (Lea, 2016) and emphasise the need for transformation in pedagogy and a transformative orientation to language and academic production (Lillis and Tuck, 2016, p.39). This ideological orientation implies a particular stance towards students who are drawn into this space as participants, legitimating students as knowledge producers as well as 'the resources for meaning making' that the students themselves bring to the university (see Lillis and Scott, 2007, p.19).

Space for diverse knowledge making practices
There has been an expansion of conception of literacy from a focus in 1998 on learning to write at university to now include a diverse range of textual and digital knowledge making practices across the university.
Re-positioning of the student body and rejection of normative pedagogy have led to calls to establish 'richer forms of engagement' (Haggis 2006, p.522). At the same time, Lea reflects on 'whether the written word . . . can ever engage fully with the notion of student writing as meaning making without the dialogic, exploratory and critical possibilities of student-teacher interactions' (Lea, 2016, p.91). This suggests that rather than searching for a definitive design frame that can be institutionally enacted, there is a need to reconfigure curricular spaces for formative, dialogic learning to invite students to explore their subjects and take risks with their learning.
While we continue to search for alternative ways to use writing and literacies to 'resist deeply entrenched attitudes about writing, and about students and disciplines' (Russell, Journal

Conclusion
Lea and Street's 1998 paper was genuinely ground-breaking and has had significant impact on HE research, pedagogy, and policymaking in many countries. Its popularity and influence among our professional communities is evident in the profusion of research and literature it has prompted and the number of citations it still receives. The range of articles referred to above, selected by colleagues from our aligned professional communities of EAP and learning development, demonstrates the breadth and persistence of interest in academic literacies, not least because research in this field raised questions about the nature of literacy at university in a way that rejected the deficit framing of students. If, twenty years ago, issues of literacy at university were marginalised and institutionally invisible (Street, 1999;Turner, 2018), now the debate about how best to work with a range of students characterised by cultural and linguistic diversity is lively and enriched. There is a substantial body of research and literature on academic literacies for practitioners to draw upon, which offers validation of the centrality of language practices in the higher education curriculum, and its relationships with the roles, power and opportunities for achievement available to participants. The importance of language and learning developmentand, by implication, the work of practitioners in our communitiesis thereby firmly established.

Generating research
Academic literacies approaches have offered a new perspective for the study of HE classroom practice, suggesting a focus on issues of roles, voices, and subject positions of staff and students. They also indicate moving beyond an approach to text that assumes its transparency and thereby point to research into the culturally situated complexities of learning to communicate at university. Understanding the situated nature of literacy implies a need to analyse the quality of disciplinary discourses and conceptions of graduate-level attainment, including the need for code-switching across subject, genre, and mode (Lea and Street, 1998). As the articles analysed in this review demonstrate, there is a recurrent concern with drawing out issues of power, both at the level of individual interaction and structurally at an institutional level, examining the gaps between discourses and agendas (Russell et al., 2009). The stress on an ethnographic focus on individuals and on practices in an academic literacies approach offers a framework for research and the development of pedagogy that is well-suited to meeting the challenges facing early twenty-first century HE practitioners. Such work implies, for example, helping students grapple with tacit expectations in terms of their learning practices, identity and identification (see Gourlay, 2009;Burgess and Ivanic, 2010;French, 2016). The proliferation of topics and themes for research generated by academic literacies approaches is well illustrated by the literature reviewed in this paper. Much of it can be traced back to interest in pursuing the assertion in Lea and Street's 1998 paper that academic writing is both complex and contested in respect of the gaps between the discourses of teaching, learning and institutional communications and students' lived experience.

Contested Terminology
One consequence of the popularity of the term 'academic literacies' has been the 'considerable fluidity and at times confusion in meanings attached to the use of the phrase' (Lillis and Scott, 2007, p.6). Furthermore, Lillis and Scott note 'the ways in which it is adopted and co-opted for use in many settings, often with a range of meanings sometimes confusing and contradictory and sometimes strategic' (p.6). This diversity of understandings and interpretations suggests that, as a sector, we are still exploring what 'academic literacies' can mean in practice.
The popularity of the term and the diverse manner in which it was used led key authors (Lea and Street, 2006;Lillis and Scott, 2007;Lea, 2016,) to re-assert some of its key principles: its critical stance and the ambition and scale of its perspective, which act as a counterpoint to the focus on individual practices and small-scale investigations. These distinctions are crucial to understanding the critiques of normative practices and academic literacies' affinity with critical EAP and the traditions and approaches of critical linguistics (Freire, 1972;Pennycook, 2010).
Here we reach a juncture between different practitioner groups who support writing development and learning at university, and who have developed distinct practical responses to the criticality of academic literacies. Faced with increasing numbers of international students accepted onto relatively short courses in Anglophone contexts, practitioners experience considerable pressures to adopt normative approaches and induct students to meet Anglophone norms. In contrast, for staff supporting home students, the critical oppositionality of academic literacies challenges the liminal status of students who are marginalised by mainstream higher education while being welcomed into it. The question is to what extent such criticality is central to an education that aims to be transformative.

Academic literacies approaches
The typology of approaches to writing development (skills, socialisation, and academic literacies) first outlined by Lea and Street (1998) Lea and Street (1998) presented academic literacies as building on skills and socialisation approaches to writing and learning development rather than in opposition to them. However, the exact nature of the relationship between approaches has proved difficult to define, both in theory and in practice. If the relationship between these approaches is not one of linear progression then this raises many practical questions concerning the delivery of, and the relationship between, these different approaches to learning, and whether current organisational arrangements for working with students and staff across the university are fit for purpose (Jacobs, 2005;Wingate, 2015).
The intersection of textually focused approaches and academic literacies is especially sharp when considering the needs of home and international students. The challenge of how to enable students to critique the work of a discipline they seek membership of is particularly pertinent for international students (see Wingate and Tribble, 2012;Wingate, 2015;Murray and Nallaya, 2016;Murray and Muller, 2018). This confirms the complexity of the precise nature of the relation of language to learning. While there is a desire to identify commonalities and areas of intersection between EAP and academic literacies (Wingate and Tribble, 2012), if the practical focus is on providing students with the tools to deconstruct and manage their own disciplinary journey, the question remains at what point are issues of power and identity addressed. Lillis and Scott (2007) crucially distinguish between 'normative' and 'transformative' approaches, analysing key tropes and metaphors used to describe learning. They identify communities of practice, apprenticeships, socialisation, scaffolding, novice and experts as terms drawn from sociocultural theory and signalling a researcher's normative interest. In contrast, they note that explicit discussions of power and authority, the use of notions of dialogism, hybridity, and intertextuality indicate a position in which conventions are viewed as contested and meaning making as a site of struggle (Lillis and Scott, 2007, p.13). Lea warns against simple labels, suggesting that 'the distinction we made between academic socialisation and academic literacies is too crude, particularly when the former becomes explicitly associated with a normative approach' (Lea, 2016, p.91). The value in distinguishing between normative and transformative approaches is in its explication of theory underpinning practices and the way it raises awareness and encourages critique of our pedagogic habits.

Modality
The digitalisation of university study has been acknowledged as '[p]robably one of the most significant changes to the higher education landscape and to the relationship between students and university teachers' (Lea, 2016, p.94). This shift in mode of delivery continues to have huge impact on the emerging textual and multimodal practices of university study (Goodfellow, 2005;Archer, 2006;Lillis and Tuck, 2016). In applying academic literacies theory to online resource design, Magyar (2012) reveals how teaching in an online blended environment requires a more nuanced understanding of social and relational implications of teaching resources, and how different designs position learners in different ways. Similarly, Lea (2016) and Lillis and Tuck (2016) note that, when using a written channel, the substantive content is reified, meaning that however discursively framed or intended, there is a real challenge of maintaining a transformative stance when information is written down. Given the ubiquity of online learning environments at UK universities, an understanding of how academic literacies are constructed in online environments is vital for learning developers and EAP tutors. This suggests a need to be Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, Issue 15: November 2019 37 able to work across modalities and apply theoretical and epistemological critiques to scrutinise emerging textual and multimodal practices, including our own as developers and teachers.

Future perspectives
Since 1998, academic literacies perspectives have increasingly influenced researchers' and practitioners' attempts to 'engage with complex issues surrounding . . . student academic writing, in contrast to the often impoverished perspective on language and literacy that is trumpeted in official and public discourses' (Lillis and Scott, 2007, p.21). The literature referred to in this review demonstrates the rich potential for further research, and the development of practice, offered by academic literacies perspectives. The sizeable response to our call for reviews (over 20 submissions) for this literature review is evidence of the numbers of practitioner researchers still inspired by Lea and Street's 1998 paper and for whom the term 'academic literacies' is relevant to their professional thinking and identity. Their ideas will continue to stimulate critical questioning of dominant discourses and inspire resistance to the 'relentless marketisation of the sector' and 'redefinition of the university for its commercial and transfer utility, as opposed to its intellectual or critical value' (Lea, 2016, p.97). The drive to teach and develop academic literacies that are appropriate, inclusive and empowering, as well as academically rigorous, alongside our students, is a motive shared among the professional learning development, writing development, and EAP communities. Sharing our ideas through projects such as this literature review is an act of collaboration and cross-fertilisation that can encourage us to be ambitious for the future; to co-operate further to promote a wider conception of what counts as appropriate resources for academic meaning making; and to engage our students in negotiation and dialogue to explore what is possible, rather than merely what is acceptable (Lillis and Tuck, 2016).