1 Introduction

This section introduces the background of China's "Four New" initiatives in higher education, emphasizing their role in driving the transformation of talent cultivation, curriculum systems, and teaching organizational approaches in universities. It highlights the importance of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in interdisciplinary learning and research collaboration, noting its necessity in helping students enhance their academic participation and interdisciplinary communication skills.

2 New Functions of English for Academic Purposes

This section discusses the new functions of EAP within the context of the "Four New" initiatives. As students' learning and research activities are embedded in collaborative environments involving multiple stakeholders, EAP must focus on the construction, expression, and negotiation of knowledge in interdisciplinary contexts. It should cultivate students' "rhetorical flexibility," enabling them to shift perspectives across disciplines, reorganize argumentation structures, and adjust expression strategies. Simultaneously, interdisciplinary research has made multimodal meaning construction a key feature of academic expression, requiring EAP to assist students in integrating meaning across text, data, and visual symbols, and to teach the production of hybrid discourses. The overarching trends of disciplinary integration, the coexistence of diverse knowledge forms, and the evolution of hybrid genres have expanded the functional boundaries of EAP, moving it beyond mere language training and writing instruction toward academic practices that are research-oriented, interpretive, and critical.

3 Research Topics in English for Academic Purposes under the "Four New" Context

This section explores new topics and orientations in EAP research under the "Four New" initiatives. Interdisciplinary collaboration and experiential learning have transformed the landscape of academic communication, extending research focus to disciplinary boundaries, genre intersections, and knowledge reconstruction zones. Three research topics are proposed: first, the discourse integration mechanisms in interdisciplinary writing and the "adhesion" of disciplinary logics in emerging genres, focusing on the coordinated integration of different argumentative dimensions, the regulation of metadiscourse, and the re-contextualization of knowledge; second, stance expression and rhetorical tension in interdisciplinary texts, investigating the dynamic adjustment of stance markers and their negotiation and reconstruction; third, dynamic multimodal resources and the symbolic coordination and meaning construction in interdisciplinary argumentation, emphasizing language's role in guiding multimodal elements, the interpretative negotiation of visual resources among members of different disciplines, and the construction of complex argumentation models.

4 Conclusion

This section underscores the importance of EAP education under the "Four New" initiatives, emphasizing that it must transcend traditional language skill training to become a practical arena for interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge integration. Facing the complex research scenarios arising from emerging disciplines, EAP research should shift toward systematically exploring disciplinary "border zones," focusing on the roles of language, stance, and multimodal resources in collaboration. This calls for updating teaching philosophies, expanding research topics, and deepening theoretical and empirical inquiries to meet the demands of real-world academic practices. Future EAP teaching and research should be grounded in the realities of China's higher education reform, contribute to cultivating interdisciplinary innovative talents, and build an autonomous knowledge system for foreign language education with Chinese characteristics.