1. Introduction
he present article concentrates on research articles (RAs), in the con-text of English for Research Publication Purposes (Cargill & Burgess, 2008; Flowerdew, 2013; Martín, Rey-Rocha, Burgess, & Moreno, 2014). he present approach does not seek to dwell on a linguistic analysis (e.g. Pérez-Llantada, 2012), but on the way the declining quality of RAs has an impact on the progression of science in general. Undeniably, the problem of published sloppy science starts at the university with researchers’ pro-ductivity being measured in terms of their publication output (Lee, 2014; Wager, Singhvi & Kleinert, 2015, p.1). In this sense, the lux of conlicting ideologies and vested interests submits L2 university students (as well as senior researchers) to “[a] pure focus on scientiic outputs [that] ignore the quality of those outputs.”(Bowen & Casadevall, 2015, p. 1). As univer-sities become more stuck in the backwaters of proit-driven mechanisms of social and cultural selection, publishing conglomerates reinforce illu-sions of smartness and rigor through the reiication of RAs within “lead-ing research communities.” As Bowen and Casadevall (2015, p. 1) rightly observe, “[w]ith increasing competition for research grants and jobs, funders and employers have turned to measures of eiciency and produc-tivity to evaluate scientists without taking into consideration, for example, the role of multitasking, i.e., “how professors allocate time between re-search and teaching duties” (Kossi, Lesueur, and Sabatier, 2015, p. 2).” On the other hand, whereas many EAP writing courses privilege “clarity” (rhetorical simplicity) and “precision” (use of key concepts), high-tier academic journals demand diferent types of compact, inexplicit and non-elaborate prose accessible to expert readers. Although the pressure on researchers for publishing in English vary considerably depending on whether they work in or outside an English speaking country, the univer-sity they work in, the discourse and speech community they belong to, the community of practice to which articles are addressed (cf. Curry & Lillis, 2004), and of course, the journal in which their work appears, the
dichotomy “novice/expert writer” (e.g., Basturkmen, 2009) that underpins every aspect of the writing-for-publishing process, is a
wrong-headed theoretical construct that pushes forth fallacious models of success and rigor represented by RAs. If we were to take this characteriza-tion at face value, two politically incorrect quescharacteriza-tions would immediately arise. What, we might ask, is the counterpart of “the successful academic English writer” (Flowerdew, 2003)? How would be such success achievable in contexts in which, for example, EAP materials make just occasional use of speciic publisher-friendly target structures (e.g. Hartig & Lu, 2014; Wood & Appel, 2014), or are unavailable? Inevitably, this raises important questions concerning the representativeness of those registers modeled by academic journals within non-native research communities. While it is beyond the scope of this article to empirically conirm relationships between patterns of hegemonic discourse and grammar, the existence of such relations is assumed throughout as an inevitable starting point for paradigmatic shits in writing instruction (cf. Wingate, 2012).
Abstract
Enticed away by the promise of “good scien-tiic practices,” non-native English speaking researchers have adopted the research-article subregister (shaped by lagship academic journals). In this article, I adduce that the current disconnect between ESL writing theory/instruction and the aggressive pro-motion of marketized
subregisters, has conspired against the devel-opment of more
democratic approaches to science-making at “the research periphery.”
Keywords:
Keywords: Commodiied registers, English for Research Publication Purposes, research articles.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License.
Challenging Commodiied Registers: the case of
English for
Research Publication Purposes
By
Sergio Torres-Martínez
1
2. Is
ERPP
the language of “good science”?
As both L1 and L2 speakers are increasingly pressed to produce linguistically suitable (publishable) research articles in academic English, the “expert writer paradigm,” modeled by scientiic journals and EAP literacies (see Turner, 2012, for a deinition), has morphed into an ideological tool that determines the shape of academic reg-isters according to the alleged demands of global research communities (conlated with core research communi-ties). Nativelike writing proiciency (“Englishization,” see Swales, 2004, p. 52) has thus been “commodiied” (cf. Pérez-Llantada, 2012, p.3) to accommodate speciic patterns of discourse consumption. In order to facilitate the production of research end-products (the research article), native English-speaking proofreading services have thus become a must in the contemporary research/writing worklow (promoted by editorial giants like Elsevier). he “expert writer” paradigm has thus gained momentum to the extent that it is impossible to identify the re-searchers’ true self from the standardized idiom promoted by language editing services and manuscript format-ting. Further, “peripheral NNS research” has been dismissed as parochial, as it fails to address “current issues in the international community of scholarship” (Flowerdew, 2001, p. 135). Moreover, the “publish in English or per-ish in academia dilemma” (Bocanegra-Valle, 2014), or, as Flowerdew and Li (2009, p. 279) put it, “the privilege attached to publishing in internationally indexed journals,” has forced many non-native English speaking schol-ars to make career-wrecking decisions to pass the muster and obtain “too much too soon,” including plagiarism, language re-use (cf. Flowerdew & Li, 2007), and even data tampering and fabrication, citation bartering, forced guest authorship (see Wager et al., 2015), etc. Of course, as the Stapel fraud has proved
(http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2015/01/20/how-diederik-stapel-became-fraud/#. VsMkN7hAdU), this is not exclusive of peripheral “sloppy science.”
On the other hand, the its-all-size linguistic ideology propounded by ELT advocates downplays local needs by conlating them with a sanitized (ideology-free) version of English as a language for communication. he homogenizing nature of published research articles in mainstream/center journals (Salager-Meyer, 2014) comes far more forcefully to the foreground in the way literacy knowledge is theorized. For example, Wenger’s (1998) conceptualizations regarding the unconscious emergence of literacy knowledge, upholds acculturation among non-native English speakers as a means to achieve full-ledged memberships in a disciplinary commu-nity (Wenger, 2000). hese communities of practice are organized around deinitions of disciplinary grandiosity and gloriication fantasies, common to contemporary organizations (see Alvesson, 2013). Crucially, as Gardner and Nesi (2013, p. 25) observe, student writer characterizations in contemporary higher education have drawn largely on subjective variables, like “intuition, the opinions of faculty, or data from course documentation and task prompts.” Fundamentally, deinitions of language, science and learning relations at the corporate university in high-income countries (a well as in emerging research centers at the “periphery”), hinge on hunch and “[f]unctional stupidity [, i.e., an] organizationally-supported lack of relexivity, substantive reasoning, and justiication” (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012, p. 1198). Beneath these contradictory notions is the inlation of L2 language policies in euphemistically-called “educational contact zones” (Singh & Doherty, 2004). his phenom-enon adopts many forms: Governmental linguistic policies blind to both teachers’ and learners’ actual needs ( Belcher, 2009; Cassels Johnson, 2009; Burke, 2013; Norris, 2013); institutional top-down mandates aiming at “reproduc[ing] social hierarchies and dominance precisely by determining what linguistic practices may count as legitimate constructions of knowledge” ( Stroud & Wee, 2007, p. 34); a bias against non-native-English-speaking students deined as “underprepared” L2 readers and writers (cf. Khami-Stein, 2003), or as “disadvantaged par-ticipants” (see Chang & Kanno, 2010, p. 671). Increasingly, then, universities around the globe endorse a dis-course that mobilizes researchers’ desire of inclusion in “smart” academic communities, enshrined at the heart of homogenizing approaches to writing “in relation to rigid views of genre” (Nunn, 2009, p. 694). In this context, concepts like discourse competence (Canale & Swain, 1980; Canale, 1983; Celce-Murcia & Dörnyei, 1995; Council of Europe, 2001), textual competence (Bachman, 1990; Bhatia, 2004), or disciplinary culture (Berken-kotter & Huckin, 1995), to name only a few, become placebic “zero-sum games” (cf. Alvesson, 2013), supporting neoliberal interests in higher education institutions. he upshot is that in EAP settings, where English is used as a subject to enable students to read academic textbooks and probably to write academic articles, academic litera-cy practices are oten divorced from discipline-oriented language policies (e.g. Cheng, 2008). he gap becomes glaring despite the spread of genre-driven approaches in EAP pursued by some practitioners and researchers in the belief that “genre-oriented instruction is one key to preparing students for the writing that they may be expected to produce during their academic career” (Molle & Prior 2008, p. 542).
2.1. Writing for publishing: A model of writing proiciency in EAP?
he formulation of a de-essentializing literacy approach involving the use of publisher-friendly target structures as a model for EAP language instruction, does not simply entail variables of textual (re)production in speciic registers, but, essentially, a critical analysis of science-oriented writing as a human commitment as subject to po-litical considerations as any area of human endeavor. As we have seen, the research article epitomizes the shaky underside of contemporary scientiic discourse; RAs act under an output-driven premise of orthodoxy that aims at stabilizing the opposing dynamics of conceptual cohesion and contingency of knowledge. hus, whereas in the ideal the commodiied article is apparently constructed as an open-ended dialogic medium (whereby the text becomes a stable and recognizable tool for knowledge exchange within research communities), in the real world, scientiic impact on databases overrides societal impact (Jansen and Ruwaard, 2012). Ultimately, therefore, what makes the hegemonic discourse indefensible is its presumption that alterity/identity relationships are homoge-neous objects, analyzable and malleable from a position of power at a central slot.
In a nutshell, ERPP has become an instrument of power justiied by appeals to linguistic neutral zones for the eicient exchange of value-free knowledge. As is the case with ELF, the focus in both EAP and ESP has been “on the ‘E’ (...) rather than on developing the relationship between English and in respect of the multilingual-ism of most ELF users and the ‘multicompetence of the community’.” (Jenkins, 2015, p. 59). he consequences for science of the publish-or-perish system in non-native speaking research communities should not be taken for granted, solely from a linguistic perspective. As suggested, ERPP theory should integrate principled descrip-tions language, content, and research-making within local communities, and the way these elements are relected by speciic genres. Importantly, the relationship between research, research outputs, publishing impact must be acknowledged as a part of contemporary “expert writing.”
In this sense, the deinition of the type or types of texts to be included in EAP settings should be re-framed in terms of a) the text’s pertinence to a speciic research ield, b) the pedagogical adjustments involved in the selection of disciplinary-oriented texts, c) new paradigms of text complexity based not only on academic quality standards but on actual usage, and d) a connection to broader environmental factors, such as learning ecology, students’ expectations, learners’ L1 as a means rather than an obstacle to attain L2 proiciency, etc. By necessity, this learner-needs-based approach should move far beyond bridging “the gap between learners’ cur-rent and target competencies” (Belcher, 2009, p. 3), to embrace a deeper understanding of what learners are expected to do as writer-researchers. Moreover, the distinction between the professional scientiic text and lit-eracy knowledge, as a mediating stage between knowledge construction through writing and community-driven knowledge construction, should be addressed in terms of structured, ield-speciic conceptualizations rather than as language-only phenomena.
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