I first briefly review two paradigms for scholarly writing, namely the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Academic Literacies (Ac Lits) approaches. ESP has traditionally been considered as the dominant paradigm and Ac Lits as somewhat on the margins of academic writing theory and practice. My aim in this article is to illustrate which areas and methodologies from ESP, especially corpus-based techniques, could usefully inform Ac Lits. The findings from corpus-based studies on the research article genre can reveal authorial voice, power relations, identity construction, as well as cross-cultural and cross-linguistic features, important issues raised in the Ac Lits literature. Corpus research has also been useful in revealing the academic values inscribed in text through recurrent lexico-grammatical patterns. Corpus linguistic techniques, at present largely absent from Ac Lits methodologies, could be considered to supplement the various ethnographic approaches associated with Ac Lits.