ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at English as an academic language as it is used by lecturers, students and researchers in higher education in many parts of the world. Disciplinary variation has been one of the key themes of research into academic writing in recent years, prompted on the one hand by a wish to understand what the disciplinary differences in writing can tell people about how different communities of scholars see knowledge and its creation, and on the other by a concern to help students understand the writing practices of the disciplines they are working within. The nature of academic English, in any of its varieties, is shaped by its various social and cultural functions as the language of academic communities of discourse. Others aspects of cultural difference, however, relate to the rhetorical styles and discourse structures that are traditionally valued within a culture, reflecting the different teaching and learning practices through which writers have been educated.
