As per this discussion:
http://forum.springframework.org/showthread.php?p=191776#post191776
"It would be great if there was a version of HibernateCursorItemReader that was 'parameter aware' out of the box, so you could add parameters to your hql string that the HibernateCursorItemReader would then attempt to fetch from the StepExecutionContext, similar, I suppose, to HibernateTemplate.findByNamedParam."
It was mentioned that the same could work for JdbcCursorItemReader. It could try to find the named param in the execution context, then possibly fall back to a map that could be provided through injection.
N.B. in the Jdbc case there is already a parameter-aware PreparedStatementSetter in core (so I removed that part of the issue summary). I don't see why the same approach shouldn't be used for Hibernate.