ABSTRACT

This chapter explores why the sense of disarticulation of identity has emerged and why it has been latently lurking throughout the history of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). It examines the salient structural forces and relations that shape practitioner identity. The chapter considers some of the tropes and discourses in the EAP literature about the practitioner that operates to both reveal and shape concerns around status, recognition, role and position in the field. Identity is an expression, a symptom, of those threats to the self and group: Identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty. Any coherent and collective practitioner identity is further weakened by perceptions that EAP centres and its practitioners are entering a period of declining status due largely to neoliberal imperatives. Socialisation raises a whole nexus of issues impacting practitioner identity.