In response to globalization and the promotion of international competitiveness, in 2005 the Ministry of Education in Taiwan announced two important initiatives to promote Taiwan's universities to the world by, for example, moving the top Taiwan universities up in the world university rankings. For this purpose, the government has adopted publication indices as an evaluation indicator for the academic excellence of higher education institutions. Governmental funding and resources are allocated to universities based on the quantity and quality of their international indexed publications, namely journals indexed in the Web of Science and the Engineering Index (now called Ei Compendex, published by Elsevier) (Chou et al., 2013). To compete for these resources, universities encourage not only faculty but also PhD students to publish in these indexed journals, especially those published in English, because they often have higher impact factors. Many universities in Taiwan, for example, stipulate that PhD students (especially those in science) publish at least one indexed English journal article before graduation (Huang, 2010). However, while Taiwanese PhD students are developing expertise in their research area, many find it challenging to write for publication in English and call for academic support on the part of universities (Huang, 2010). Similarly, Chen et al. (2012) underscore the need for medical and scientific English courses offered to students whose first language is not English.

To help PhD students write research articles, many Taiwanese universities have implemented English research writing courses, and subject experts usually deliver these courses within their respective departments. For instance, around 60% of the graduate programs in medicine in Taiwan provide disciplinary academic writing courses (Lee, 2012). Nevertheless, an investigation into the courses delivered in subject departments indicated that subject experts often fell short of teaching the generic and linguistic knowledge that students expected to learn (Huang, 2013). On the other hand, effective courses taught by writing instructors using genre-based pedagogies have been reported (Cheng, 2008).