John Flowerdew introduces the special issue of Writing and Pedagogy on ESAP Writing.

Writing Statements of Purpose (SoP) is a challenging task for students applying for English-speaking graduate schools, as they need to demonstrate their competence as junior members of the research community and satisfy the requirements of admission officers. Previous studies have focused primarily on the SoPs written by US applicants or the perspectives of admission officers. This study investigates how Chinese students wrote and revised their SoPs for US Ph.D. programs through an action research project which offered feedback on their earlier drafts. Through participatory genre analysis of a small corpus of both earlier and final versions of SoPs by 20 Chinese applicants admitted to US graduate schools, it is found that, after revising their SoPs, the applicants tended to enact their researcher identities by removing certain moves and steps that were less relevant to the rhetorical purposes and adopting the moves and steps usually found in research articles. A framework for writing SoPs based on the results of a genre analysis of a small corpus of the successful SoPs is developed to help future applicants and their language teachers.

This introductory review article for this special issue sets out a range of issues in play as far as English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing is concerned, but with a special emphasis on English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) (as opposed to English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP)). Following the introduction, the article begins by outlining the different types of EAP and presenting the pros and cons of ESAP and EGAP for writing. It then goes on to review work in a range of areas of relevance to ESAP writing. These areas are register and discourse analysis; genre analysis; corpus analysis; ethnography; contrastive rhetoric; classroom methodology; critical approaches; and assessment. The article concludes by arguing that whichever model of writing is chosen (EGAP or ESAP), or if a hybrid model is the choice, if at all possible, students need to be exposed to the understandings, language and communicative activities of their target disciplines, with students themselves also contributing to this enterprise.