Reconceptualising Academic Writing as Craft. A Phenomenographic Investigation into International Graduate Student Research Writing Learned as Craft Ov

Academic writing is a practice often fraught with difficulties, especially so for students whose first language background is not English (Tuck, 2018 Turner, 2018 Pare, 2019). This is not necessarily solely due to differences between English and a students second language. Additionally, there are other literacy issues, for instance if international students come to study in the UK from prior academic backgrounds where writing did not have the same primacy, the mode of writing itself may be unfamiliar (Turner, 2018 231 4). Anxiety is a key problem with academic writing universal to L1 and non L1 English student writers (eg Russell-Pinson and Harris, 2019 French, 2018). Studies which have examined graduate writing as a social academic practice in the context non L1 English academic writers have also highlighted problematic issues related to identity, (e.g. Botelho de Margalhaes et al., 2019 Casanave, 2019 ) i.e. a need to adopt a new identity in the new academic writing context or to adjust or suppress elements of what has been termed their autobiographical self as writer (Ivanic, 1998). Pare (2019) suggests that the greatest problem with writing for English as an additional language (EAL) graduate students however goes beyond this and is an existential one. He questions the value of the writing produced by students itself as a key issue, stating that dissertations "too often are read by a handful of academics and then gather real dust on library shelves or virtual dust in university archives" (Pare, 2019 83).

Beyond the challenges for students and their supervisors there is then