This paper reports on the study of multilingual speakers’ perception of their research writing practices in English and in their local language—Russian—and the publication process in English. It is based on interviews with 18 scholars from social sciences and humanities working in a leading university in Russia. The study discusses social factors influencing multilingual scholars’ choice of languages as well as their personal motivation to choose English as the main language of publication. Special attention is given to their attitude to proofreading as part of the publication process. The interview results suggest that, from the participants’ perspective, the benefits they gain by publishing research in English seem to outweigh costs they experience in the process of writing and publishing. The study contributes to the on-going debate about the position of multilingual scholars in the competition to publish in top-rated journals, suggesting that the traditional doctrine of linguistic injustice, from the participants’ point-of-view, does not seem to be relevant for every multilingual scholar.
Nowadays, when English has firmly established itself as a lingua franca (ELF) in academic settings, it is very important to study the features of texts written by L2 speakers who come from a variety of cultural and L1 backgrounds and who use ELF in their academic communication. The present study focuses on clusters of epistemic stance expressions used in research articles in social sciences and humanities written by L2 speakers. The analysis of twenty papers from the SciELF corpus reveals the patterns in the use of epistemic stance clusters, their distribution in different sections of research articles and the functions the clusters perform at the textual level. The results show that there are many similarities in the distribution and functions of epistemic stance clusters in texts. This suggests that the way L2 speakers, who are professionals in their fields, express epistemic stance seems to be more influenced by the norms of the genre and the discipline than by their linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
In contemporary academia, multilingual scholars using English as an additional language (EAL) are actively engaged
in knowledge construction producing more research texts in English than native speakers (Hyland, 2016). Having a more general purpose to gain insights into the factors that influence multilingual scholars’
research writing practices in English, this case study seeks to explore how EAL users perceive disciplinary norms of epistemic
stance expression in political science. It is based on interviews with 5 Russian political scientists and on the analysis of their
research texts. The findings suggest that the participants do not seem to have a shared understanding of disciplinary norms
regarding epistemic stance expression; however, their narratives highlight the importance of the methodological paradigm the texts
belong to for their writing practices. The study is a contribution to the discussion of the role of the discipline in EAL
scholars’ research writing practices and linguistic and rhetorical variability of research texts within one discipline. The
results of this study have pedagogical implications for ERPP course designers and practitioners.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.