The Author Replies KEN HYLAND University of London London, England Ⅲ The motivation for our article was to question the widely held assumption that there is a single core vocabulary for academic study irrespective of discipline, and I am pleased this is the main point picked up by John Eldridge in his response The issue is not that the AWL fails to provide an adequate academic vocabulary, but whether this goal is feasible at all given the specific communicative demands that particular disciplinary communities make on students But while Eldridge accepts our findings regarding the specificity of lexical choices across broad academic fields, he disagrees with how we suggest teachers use this information Instead he highlights the difficulties of identifying a clear target corpus for instruction in contexts where students experience diverse and multiple literacies This is a reasonable concern, and we agree not all academic literacies are directly associated with disciplines The situation is complicated, however, by the fact that literacies are not just tools we pick up and put down as we need them but are central to community epistemologies and personal identities Students have to deploy a repertoire of literacy practices appropriate to different settings and handle the social meanings and identities that each evokes Determining needs, in fact, raises serious ethical, economic, and political questions for teachers, and although it is often talked about as a kind of objective educational technology, needs analysis is like any other classroom practice in that it involves decisions based on teachers’ interests, values, and beliefs about teaching, learning, and language Eldridge’s article thus stresses the key difficulty for EAP teachers: Of all the potentially relevant discourses students will participate in, how we identify those to inform curricula and materials which will most effectively empower them? How teachers answer this question, and use the kind of information we report in our study, invariably depends on local circumstances Any response to the needs question can only ever be THE FORUM 113 partial and imperfect and will very much depend on a range of contextual factors that are inevitably locally managed Proficiency, teacher and learner preferences, resources, the urgency of immediate goals, and the remoteness of target genres will all affect teachers’ decisions and influence how far they proceed down the road to specificity Ultimately, teachers working in the prespecialisation IELTS contexts to which Eldridge refers might find some value in the kinds of “similarities and generalities that will facilitate instruction in an imperfect world.” Here a kind of revamped GSL, perhaps based around multiword clusters, could provide blessed relief for hard-pressed teachers More widely, however, we should not retreat from the principle of specificity to a hopeful one-size-fits-all approach Enough evidence now exists to underline the relevance of a community-oriented approach to literacy and the potential advantages of tailoring language teaching to discipline-specific communicative contexts and events Generalities might be comforting but in the end we need, as far as possible, to ground our teaching in the concrete practices, discourses, and beliefs of individuals acting in particular disciplinary communities THE AUTHOR Ken Hyland is a professor of education and Head of the Centre for Academic and Professional Literacies at the Institute of Education, University of London, England He has taught in numerous countries and published more than 120 articles and 11 books on writing and applied linguistics 114 TESOL QUARTERLY