Composition studies and EAP

Introduction In the United States, the field known as composition studies, or rhetoric and composition, has historically been linked to concerns of undergraduate writing instruction. Despite its shared interests with English for academic purposes (EAP) in language and literacy development and support, however, conceptions of academic English and how it should be taught are not identical across the two fields of study, influenced by distinct historical origins, disciplinary alignments, and pedagogical contexts. Over the past few decades, numerous theoretical concepts and empirical insights from composition scholarship have been influential in EAP research and practice, but because the contexts on which the two fields focus differ in important ways-with EAP being tied to transnational, multilingual contexts of language instruction and composition studies being linked to US contexts of writing instructionsinterests, values, and pedagogical approaches often vary across these two fields of study.