Researching, Teaching, and Supporting Research Publication: Issues for Users of English as an Additional Language

A special issue of Publications (ISSN 2304-6775).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 January 2016) | Viewed by 41832

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, University of Adelaide, South Australia 5005 Australia
Interests: pedagogy of research communication; interdisciplinary collaboration; English as an additional language in research communication; applied linguistics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The third PRISEAL Conference – Publishing and Presenting Research Internationally: Issues for Speakers of English as an Additional Language – will build the community and develop the debates begun in the first two conferences under this banner, in Tenerife (2007) and Katowice (2011). The issues and challenges discussed there have intensified for researchers of all disciplines who use English as an Additional Language, and research and practice have moved to address them in interesting ways. The conference seeks contributions from the widest possible range of scholars and practitioners involved in these issues today. This Special Issue of Publications will showcase selected contributions to the conference, plus additional papers that contribute substantially to the conference themes.

Aiming at a better understanding of the complex situation of users of English as an Additional Language, we invite submissions from journal publishers, editors, and referees; authors' editors and translators; teachers, materials writers, and course designers for English for Research Publication Purposes; and scholars within humanities and social science fields, including applied linguistics. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • academic publishing issues (e.g., the advantages and limitations of open-access vs. commercial publishers; predatory journals and publishers)
  • the geopolitics of academic writing (e.g., the dominance of English, epistemicide , English as a Lingua Franca)
  • academic ethics from a cross-cultural perspective (e.g., plagiarism and academic integrity)
  • translation and editing in the academic context
  • teaching of English for research and publication purposes
  • peer-reviewing in intercultural and multilingual contexts

In terms of the genre, contributions can be think-pieces, theoretical discussions, research reports with empirical data, or reviews of relevant literature that lead to new insights for the field.

All submissions will undergo the regular peer review and editorial procedures followed by the journal, using double-blind review. Please remove all reference to the author/s of the submission in the text and reference list. We look forward to your contributions and remain open to any questions you may have.

Margaret Cargill
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Publications is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • academic writing
  • publication strategy
  • English as an additional language (EAL)
  • English for research publication purposes (ERPP)

Published Papers (7 papers)

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Editorial

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141 KiB  
Editorial
Introduction to the Special Issue: Researching, Teaching, and Supporting Research Publication—Issues for Users of English as an Additional Language
by Margaret Cargill
Publications 2016, 4(3), 27; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications4030027 - 10 Aug 2016
Viewed by 4866
Abstract
The ‘industry’ of research publication has now grown to mammoth proportions and its participants—authors, reviewers, editors, publishers and more—come from increasingly diverse locations and backgrounds, including of language.[...] Full article

Research

Jump to: Editorial

189 KiB  
Article
Thesis Supervisors as Literacy Brokers in Brazil
by Ron Martinez and Karin Graf
Publications 2016, 4(3), 26; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications4030026 - 05 Aug 2016
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 5933
Abstract
In Brazil, as in much of the academic world, there is an increasing acknowledgement among scholars that their chances of having their research noticed by a geographically diverse scientific community increase when that research is communicated in English. At the same time, much [...] Read more.
In Brazil, as in much of the academic world, there is an increasing acknowledgement among scholars that their chances of having their research noticed by a geographically diverse scientific community increase when that research is communicated in English. At the same time, much like the majority of the world, the first language of Brazil is not English, which raises one question that heretofore has not been addressed in the context of that country: How do Brazilian scholars write their research articles in English? That question drove the initial phase of the exploratory study described in the present paper, and it is one that also led the authors to discover that one key agent in the publishing process in Brazilian academia is the dissertation/thesis supervisor. Questionnaire and interview data collected from students and supervisors at a Brazilian university suggest that student and lecturer alike see the need and value of specialized writing guidance, yet neither party seems to ascribe the role of “literacy broker” (a person who contributes to the development of a text intended for publication) to the thesis supervisor in any specific way. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are discussed. Full article
775 KiB  
Article
Counteracting Domain Loss and Epistemicide in Specialized Discourse: A Case Study on the Translation of Anglophone Metaphors to French
by Geneviève Bordet
Publications 2016, 4(2), 18; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications4020018 - 21 Jun 2016
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 5543
Abstract
The dominance of English as the world language of publication has had a decisive impact on the dissemination of information and innovation across cultures, with a resulting tendency to a standardization of scientific conceptualization. This dominance does not only impact scientific and academic [...] Read more.
The dominance of English as the world language of publication has had a decisive impact on the dissemination of information and innovation across cultures, with a resulting tendency to a standardization of scientific conceptualization. This dominance does not only impact scientific and academic discourse, but also the whole range of professional and technical texts representative of various specialized discourses. This paper advocates engaging in the practice of dynamic translation to keep non-English specialized languages alive. Advanced students’ analysis of translation projects yields revealing examples of conflicting views of the world, between English and French, in emerging and controversial fields such as “shadow banking” or “human branding”. The students’ evaluation of alternative solutions to problems of equivalence highlights the cultural gaps which exist within global fields of knowledge and can be interpreted in terms of the intercultural and interlinguistic transfer of specialized metaphor. It is shown that the practice and analysis of translation provide an appropriate approach for a better understanding of languages for specific purposes (LSP) and the development of awareness of domain loss and epistemicide. Full article
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236 KiB  
Article
Issues with Publishing Abstracts in English: Challenges for Portuguese Linguists’ Authorial Voices
by Joana Vieira Santos and Paulo Nunes Da Silva
Publications 2016, 4(2), 12; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications4020012 - 22 Apr 2016
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 4992
Abstract
This paper assesses the impact of publishing abstracts in English in the Portuguese Linguistics Association (APL) Proceedings from 2001 to 2010. The study was carried out with a corpus of 137 abstracts, follows a Text Linguistics model inspired by the Interactionnisme Sociodiscoursif and [...] Read more.
This paper assesses the impact of publishing abstracts in English in the Portuguese Linguistics Association (APL) Proceedings from 2001 to 2010. The study was carried out with a corpus of 137 abstracts, follows a Text Linguistics model inspired by the Interactionnisme Sociodiscoursif and links text features to the social practices and genre repertoires of this community. Quantitative data show signs of a “Portuguese identity” in authors’ voices such as personal forms, move signaling, long sentences, profuse embedding, heavy subjects, and variations in content selection, but also signs of standard academic guideline-indexed choices in impersonal forms, template sentences, coordinated constituents, nominalizations, and conventional text plans. Standard genre models and writing features from “core” academic communities coexist with alternative and traditional ways of writing and of disseminating knowledge, which is typical of a semiperipheral non-native English-speaking community torn between conflicting language and cultural paradigms. These contrasting tendencies are linked to identity changes within the community, as APL authors try to achieve international recognition by publishing abstracts in English as a Foreign Language. Since the APL research topic is the Portuguese language, the process mirrors the authors’ struggle between standard internationalization in English and individual stance in Portuguese. Full article
446 KiB  
Article
Content and Phrasing in Titles of Original Research and Review Articles in 2015: Range of Practice in Four Clinical Journals
by Mary Ellen Kerans, Anne Murray and Sergi Sabatè
Publications 2016, 4(2), 11; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications4020011 - 14 Apr 2016
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 6722
Abstract
Reporting guidelines for clinical research designs emerged in the mid-1990s and have influenced various aspects of research articles, including titles, which have also been subject to changing uses with the growth of electronic database searching and efforts to reduce bias in literature searches. [...] Read more.
Reporting guidelines for clinical research designs emerged in the mid-1990s and have influenced various aspects of research articles, including titles, which have also been subject to changing uses with the growth of electronic database searching and efforts to reduce bias in literature searches. We aimed (1) to learn more about titles in clinical medicine today and (2) to develop an efficient, reliable way to study titles over time and on the fly—for quick application by authors, manuscript editors, translators and instructors. We compared content and form in titles from two general medical journals—the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the British Medical Journal—and two anesthesiology journals (the European Journal of Anaesthesiology and Anesthesiology); we also analyzed the inter-rater reliability of our coding. Significant content differences were found in the frequencies of mentions of methods, results (between general and subspecialty titles), and geographic setting; phrasing differences were found in the prevalence of full-sentence and compound titles (and their punctuation). NEJM titles were significantly shorter, and this journal differed consistently on several features. We conclude that authors must learn to efficiently survey titles for form and content patterns when preparing manuscripts to submit to unfamiliar journals or on resubmitting to a new journal after rejection. Full article
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197 KiB  
Communication
A Proposal for Critical-Pragmatic Pedagogical Approaches to English for Research Publication Purposes
by James Corcoran and Karen Englander
Publications 2016, 4(1), 6; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications4010006 - 22 Mar 2016
Cited by 24 | Viewed by 7824
Abstract
Despite the increasing demands on many multilingual scholars outside the centre(s) of scientific knowledge production to publish their research in international scholarly journals, the support for such academic writing for publication is uneven at best. Existing English for research publication purposes (ERPP) instruction [...] Read more.
Despite the increasing demands on many multilingual scholars outside the centre(s) of scientific knowledge production to publish their research in international scholarly journals, the support for such academic writing for publication is uneven at best. Existing English for research publication purposes (ERPP) instruction typically aims to aid multilingual scholars in achieving genre-based expectations and/or navigating the submission and review process, but it often does not address the politics of English-language knowledge production. In this paper, informed by an empirical case study and a theory building perspective, we address the need for a sustained program of courses/workshops for multilingual scholars in the (semi-) periphery and propose a means of operationalizing a critical-pragmatic approach to such course/workshop content. Our empirically-driven model is informed by the results of a recent case study investigation into an intensive ERPP intervention designed to address multilingual Spanish-speaking L1 scholars’ challenges with writing research articles for publication in indexed (Web of Science) international scientific journals. Our model lays the groundwork for a more critical approach to ERPP pedagogy, one that attempts to attend more fully to the needs of multilingual scholars within an asymmetrical market of global knowledge production. Full article
213 KiB  
Article
English or Englishes in Global Academia: A Text-Historical Take on Genre Analysis
by Oliver Shaw
Publications 2016, 4(1), 5; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications4010005 - 24 Feb 2016
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 5304
Abstract
The challenge of publishing internationally for non-native English speakers (NNESs) is substantial, although there are conflicting accounts as to how NNES-authored texts fare in English-medium journals and the nature of the criticism levied at these texts. Collaborators from a wide variety of backgrounds [...] Read more.
The challenge of publishing internationally for non-native English speakers (NNESs) is substantial, although there are conflicting accounts as to how NNES-authored texts fare in English-medium journals and the nature of the criticism levied at these texts. Collaborators from a wide variety of backgrounds and skill sets may contribute to these texts, and the aspects they focus on differ based on their profile. One of these aspects, rhetorical appropriateness, is of interest to the study of NNES writing because of difficulties authors have in adapting to the discourse-level features of English-medium academic texts. This article presents a multi-year research project exploring the rhetorical characteristics of writing produced by 10 NNES academics seeking to publish in international biomedical journals. Using a text-historical approach, the study traces the arc of 10 different research articles across multiple drafts, analyzing the processes and agents behind these drafts and the feedback received from target journals. Focusing on rhetorically significant changes made across different drafts and comments concerning linguistic issues, this paper seeks to further the understanding of English as a lingua franca within written discourse in the field of biomedicine. One text history is presented to exemplify the methods. Full article
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