Abstract
Academic texts in English-medium instruction (EMI) are often treated as neutral vehicles for disciplinary knowledge, obscuring the culturally situated assumptions through which knowledge, identity, and academic participation are valued. This qualitative case study examines how Western cultural logics are realised in course texts and how students engage with them in a multilingual Foundation Programme in Kazakhstan. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics and the Appraisal framework, we analysed institutional documents, assigned readings, student essays, and retrospective interviews through inductive, evaluative, and cross-source analysis. Findings show that course texts privileged particular identities and ways of knowing, presupposed disciplinary, rhetorical, and cultural knowledge, and did not necessarily provide epistemic access even when content was locally familiar. The study reveals an epistemic asymmetry: dominant academic assumptions can circulate as culturally unmarked, while students’ own ways of knowing remain largely outside the textual frame. The issue is not Western texts themselves, but whether their assumptions remain unmarked or become open to scrutiny and negotiation.