ABSTRACT
Research on written academic English as a lingua franca (WAELF) poses challenges to dominant understandings of written academic English (WAE) and of each of the constituent terms comprising WAE by extending the kinds of writers, readers, writing, English and activities to be considered 'academic'. The work of writing, in other words, can be freed from the 'textualist' bias afflicting those working in the disciplinary traditions of literary critical theory, critical literacy and discourse analysis. Inevitably, differences in the disciplinary research traditions and academic institutional contexts of those approaching the question of WAELF have produced differences in models for WAELF. Much research on WAELF aims at combatting policies, official and tacit, which dismiss the legitimacy of writing that appears to deviate from SWE, but it has focused largely on the effects of those policies on writers and on the production and circulation of knowledge.
