Disciplinary variation has been a growing interest in English for academic purposes research (Basturkmen, 2012; Hardy & Roemer, 2013). However, there is little research on writing conventions in the respiratory therapy discipline, which connects English as an additional language (EAL) users worldwide. To explore academic literacy in respiratory therapy, corpora of respiratory therapy research articles and master’s theses were collected. Using multi-dimensional analysis, the lexico-grammatical features in each corpus were compared to explore differences in student and expert writing. The rhetorical moves of a subset of research articles were analyzed. To identify academic literacy challenges in respiratory therapy and approaches to overcoming these challenges, a survey was distributed to respiratory therapy master’s students, and instructors and EAL master’s students were interviewed. The MDA results indicated significant differences in the features used in student and expert writing: student theses contained wordier descriptions than research articles, RAs contained more descriptive connecting devices than theses, students used different features from expert writers to convey action-focused styles, and RAs displayed cautious author-involvement. The rhetorical moves identified included general openers, referencing specific findings, indicating the need for the study, announcing the study (introduction), describing the study and data, explaining procedures, describing the analysis (methods), providing general information about the sample, reporting results of measurements, providing analysis results (results), introducing the discussion section, elaborating on the results, listing limitations (discussion), discussing the general topic, stating results, providing interpretations, and stating implications (conclusion). Survey and interview data indicated that students faced challenges with source-based writing (reading comprehension, paraphrasing, citation, literature reviews), vocabulary, grammar, concision, organization, clarity, survey question composing, topic selection, and attitudes towards writing. Students developed strategies for practicing reading and writing, focusing on key ideas in texts, taking reading notes, finding themes in the literature, following the structure of example texts, revising drafts, and starting writing projects early. Students utilized departmental resources (a writing seminar, scaffolding assignments in courses, and support from instructors), university librarian support, and electronic resources (academic source databases, AI paraphrasing tools, translation tools, Grammarly, and citation software) to overcome these challenges. The results have implications for EAP pedagogy and future research.