There has been an increasing demand for postgraduate students to publish their scholarly work as one of their graduation requirements. The present study attempted to explore the graduate students’ challenges in writing for scholarly publication seen from the perspectives of discursive challenges. This qualitative research employed case study to disclose the participants’ perceived constraints. The students participated in this study three final-year female students undertaking their master’s degree in English Language Teaching (ELT) in a university in Central Java. Data were garnered from semi-structured interviews. The findings discovered the discursive challenges that the participants faced in writing for scholarly publication including accuracy, genre understanding, interference of L1 to L2 production, and lexical items. It is expected that this study provides new insights for EAP design for higher education context so that the program addresses the needs of the graduate students.

The demand of writing for scholarly publication as a part of graduation requirements has now been apparent in many graduate programs. The present study attempted to discover the English Language Teaching (ELT) graduate students’ practices in writing for scholarly publication. This present study employed case study to further disclose the graduate students’ perceived discursive and non-discursive constraints as well as the way they learn how to write for scholarly publication. To collect the data, a synchronous interview session was conducted to two ELT master’s students from a state university in Central Java, Indonesia. Drawing on the theory of discourse community and legitimate peripheral participation, the participants challenges and learning process of learning process were scrutinized. It is expected that this study provides new insights for policy making in a postgraduate context and for the teaching of EAP to support writing for scholarly publication.