Setting the stage(s) for English for Research and Publication Purposes: Authors, audiences, and learning the craft

Abstract

The stage is an apt metaphor for how the ERPP community has come to understand research-based writing: research writing is of course a textual practice, but it is also inherently social, with both cognitive and affective dimensions. The aim of our paper (based on a talk given at NFEAP in 2021) is to bring new insights to our understanding of these stages by presenting a few data examples derived from a task completed by a group of doctoral students in the sciences. The task was designed to foreground primarily social facets of writing: writing as genre performance on a specific stage, for a specific audience and as a form of situated, purposeful communication against the backdrop of the current knowledge within a field. Further, the task foregrounded writing as a form of development towards a self-directed, agentive and possibly creative adaptation of one’s authorial choices. We present three main arguments: first, we show that a straightforward disciplinary framing of research-based writing may not be reflective of the hybridised, fluid and multidisciplinary audiences that our students write for; second, we argue that students need support in recognising this complexity and in developing rhetorical adroitness in order to write effectively; and third, we call for deeper engagement with well-established theories of learning such as self-regulation and metacognition to design tasks that investigate and promote student learning, and that encompass the social, cognitive and affective dimensions of genre performance.

The Presentation to Publication Pipeline

“…As you develop your research, plan for different audiences. Negretti and McGrath (2022) used the metaphor of publication as a stage where researchers perform different genres for varied audiences where "a straightforward disciplinary framing of research-based writing may not be reflective of the hybridized, fluid and multidisciplinary audiences" (p. 9). You will write very differently for various groups of people, which necessitates understanding who those audiences are.…”

Translation and dealing with “the other” in scholarly research and publishing:

“…writer with an awareness of the social dimensions of research writing. Teachers of research communication need to bear in mind that in contemporary academia, researchers-especially in fields traditionally referred to as 'applied'-often have complex, fluid, and dynamic disciplinary identities, and write in hybrid genres for heterogeneous audiences (Negretti & McGrath, 2022). Learning to navigate the complexities of such writing contexts requires support from the onset of doctoral studies.…”