This article describes a situated engineering project at a South African HE institution which is underpinned by collaboration between Applied Language Studies (DALS) and Mechanical Engineering. The collaboration requires language practitioners and engineering experts to negotiate and collaborate on academic literacies practices, discourse understandings, reports as genres as well as literacy concerns so that engineering students can acquire the necessary academic literacies to be successful in HE and in the workplace. Although the collaboration intends to facilitate the embedding of teaching and learning of literacies into disciplinary discourses enacted in the writing of different kinds of genres in mainstream curricula (Jacobs, 2007b, p. 870), collaboration practices are complex and lengthy and require systematic and sustained collaboration with discourse teachers (Jacobs, 2007a) in engineering "communities of practice" (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The article focuses on literacies understandings and discourse development as well as practices and organisational circumstances that generate and /or delimit specific discourse collaboration practices.