Invited colloquium: There and back again - Reimagining disciplinary writing instruction in a digital world

Other conference contribution, 2026

‘Impact’ is becoming ever more prominent in higher education: academic endeavours need to demonstrate benefits to society, and universities need to reach wider audiences via digital platforms. The term “impact” escalates what was framed as ‘scholarship of engagement’ (Boyer, 1996), which aims to establish a reciprocal relationship between civic engagement into the production of knowledge. A key aspect of scholarship of engagement is its critique of the increasing specialization of academic knowledge into discrete disciplines, a trend that we have seen in genre pedagogy in its dissection of disciplinary discourse to identify teachable conventions; and in the research on writing instruction, with its increased specialization on L2 proficiency in academic writing. How can we, as applied linguists, instead, leverage digitalization, and especially the emergence of multimodal genres of communication, to promote a scholarship of engagement in both our own fields and others? We can (and should) engage in outreach activities ourselves, but perhaps a more long-lasting and meaningful impact in education, a scholarship of engagement, is best achieved through teaching, rather than LinkedIn. We can go back to where writing instruction starts—to the task. In our recent editorial, we highlighted how tasks that require reformulation (Swales, 1990) can generate rhetorical consciousness and the agility needed to communicate across contexts. Rather than focusing on disciplinarity, we can shift to a writing pedagogy that encompasses the range of genres researchers now perform, including digital and multimodal. To illustrate the point, we show how combining the analysis and production of a traditional academic genre (abstract) with a digital genre (blog post) within a series scaffolded reformulation tasks fosters metacognition of authorial choices, genre awareness, and genre-specific knowledge, ultimately facilitating engagement between academic writers and broader audiences.