Forum : Welcome to the Machine: Thoughts on Writing for Scholarly Publication

The expression ‘publish or perish’ has probably never been as cruelly applicable as it is today. Universities in many countries now require their staff to publish in major, high-impact, peer-reviewed Anglophone journals as a pre-requisite for tenure, promotion and career advancement, making participation in this global web of scholarship an obligation for academics all over the world. Junior scholars therefore suddenly find themselves having to navigate the unfamiliar and dangerous waters of the international publication process. But while this all looks rather daunting, it serves important learning purposes for novice authors and with some planning and care, the process need not be as traumatic as it first seems. In this short forum piece I want to support the editors of this new journal in encouraging aspiring scholarly writers in their efforts to share their research as broadly as possible, thus bringing work that would otherwise remain local to the attention of international audiences

Metadiscourse: What is it and where is it going?

Metadiscourse – the ways in which writers and speakers interact through their use of language with readers and listeners – is a widely used term in current discourse analysis, pragmatics and language teaching. This interest has grown up over the past 40 years driven by a dual purpose. The first is a desire to understand the relationship between language and its contexts of use. That is, how individuals use language to orient to and interpret particular communicative situations, and especially how they draw on their understandings of these to make their intended meanings clear to their interlocutors. The second is to employ this knowledge in the service of language and literacy education. But while many researchers and teachers find it to be a conceptually rich and analytically powerful idea, it is not without difficulties of definition, categorisation and analysis. In this paper I explore the strengths and shortcomings of the concept and map its influence and directions through a state of the art analysis of the main online academic databases and current published research

The Essential Hyland:Studies in Applied Linguistics

Writing in the academy has assumed huge importance in recent years as countless students and academics around the world must now gain fluency in the conventions of academic writing in English to understand their disciplines, to establish their careers or to successfully navigate their learning. Professor Ken Hyland has been a contributor to the literature on this topic for over 20 years, with 26 books and over 200 chapters and articles. This work has had considerable influence in shaping the direction of the field and generating papers and PhD theses from researchers around the world. This is a topic which has found its time, as a central concept in applied linguistics, sociology of science, library studies, bibliometrics, and so on. This book brings together Ken Hyland's most influential and cited papers. These are organised thematically to provide both an introduction to the study of academic discourse and an overview of his contribution to the understanding of how academics construct themselves, their disciplines and knowledge through written texts. Several academic celebrities from the field provide a brief commentary on the papers and the book includes an overall reflection by the author on the impact of the papers and the direction of the field together with linear notes on the specific papers in each section. The volume not only includes some of Hyland's best chapters and journal articles but the thoughts of disciplinary luminaries on both the ideas in the book and the general state and direction of the field

Academic publishing and the myth of linguistic injustice

Academic publication now dominates the lives of academics across the globe who must increasingly submit their research for publication in high profile English language journals to move up the career ladder. The dominance of English in academic publishing, however, has raised questions of communicative inequality and the possible 'linguistic injustice' against an author's mother tongue. Native English speakers are thought to have an advantage as they acquire the language naturalistically while second language users must invest more time, effort and money into formally learning it and may experience greater difficulties when writing in English. Attitude surveys reveal that English as an Additional Language authors often believe that editors and referees are prejudiced against them for any non-standard language. In this paper, I critically review the evidence for linguistic injustice through a survey of the literature and interviews with scholars working in Hong Kong. I argue that framing publication problems as a crude Native vs non-Native polarization not only draws on an outmoded respect for 'Native speaker' competence but serves to demoralizes EAL writers and marginalize the difficulties experienced by novice L1 English academics. The paper, then, is a call for a more inclusive and balanced view of academic publishing

Methods and methodologies in second language writing research

A considerable variety of methods have been used to understand the complex, multifaceted nature of L2 writing. Often driven by pedagogical imperatives and informed by particular views of writing, texts and writers, these methods themselves raise questions regarding what we believe writing is and about our interpretive practices. With increasing numbers of teachers and scholars turning to investigate writing in their classrooms or courses of further study, it may be helpful to be aware of what options are available for studying writing and how these relate to key methodological designs. More than this, however, it is important to be aware of what our choices imply about our understanding of what writing is and how it can be known. In this paper I set out the main approaches to studying writing for novice researchers, providing examples of key studies, and go on to situate these methods within the main theories about writing arguing that methods are not neutral options but allow us to see certain things but not others. They do not just tell us different things about writing but reveal what we believe writing to be

Welcome to the machine: thoughts on writing for scholarly publication.

The expression ‘publish or perish’ has probably never been as cruelly applicable as it is today. Universities in many countries now require their staff to publish in major, high-impact, peer-reviewed Anglophone journals as a pre-requisite for tenure, promotion and career advancement, making participation in this global web of scholarship an obligation for academics all over the world. Junior scholars therefore suddenly find themselves having to navigate the unfamiliar and dangerous waters of the international publication process. But while this all looks rather daunting, it serves important learning purposes for novice authors and with some planning and care, the process need not be as traumatic as it first seems. In this short forum piece I want to support the editors of this new journal in encouraging aspiring scholarly writers in their efforts to share their research as broadly as possible, thus bringing work that would otherwise remain local to the attention of international audiences

WRITING THEORIES AND WRITING PEDAGOGIES

This paper explores the main approaches to understanding and teaching writing. Making a broad distinction between theories concerned with texts, with writers and with readers, I will show what each approach offers and neglects and what each means for teachers.  The categorisation implies no rigid divisions, and, in fact the three approaches respond to, critique, and draw on each other in a variety of ways. I believe, however, this offers a useful way of comparing and evaluating the research each approach has produced and the pedagogic practices they have generated. Keywords:   Teaching writing; Pedagogic practices; Approaches

Chinese academics writing for publication:English teachers as text mediators

This paper discusses a key aspect of Chinese scholars writing for publication in English: the role played by local English teachers as literacy brokers or “text mediators”. Increasingly, academics in China are required to publish their research in prestigious international journals to progress their careers, and are turning to local English teaching colleagues for assistance. The expense, uncertain competence and sometimes dubious ethical practices of professional editing services, combined with the co-present contact and personal relationships formed with local colleagues, mean that Chinese English teachers are rapidly becoming a valuable resource for turning the massive number of Chinese submissions into publishable papers. This relationship, however, is complicated by the lack of institutional funding for language mediation of this kind and by the uncertainties of appropriate reward for this work. This paper examines the kinds of cooperation and difficulties experienced between local English teachers and scientists in some Chinese universities

“We must conclude that…”:A diachronic study of academic engagement

Engagement is the way that writers explicitly acknowledge the presence of their readers in a text, drawing them in through readermention, personal asides, appeals to shared knowledge, questions and directives. This is a key rhetorical feature of academic writing and has been a topic of interest to applied linguists for over 20 years. Despite this interest, however, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred across different disciplines. Are academic texts becoming more interactional and if so in what ways and in what fields? Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we look for answers to these questions to determine whether reader engagement has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years. Our paper presents, and attempts to account for, some surprising variations and an overall decline in explicit engagement during this period