Exploring the Practices and Experiences of Japan-based Language Educators: Writing for Academic Publication: Examining Authors’ Interactions with Editors (original) (raw)
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Learned Publishing, 2016
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Specialized Discourses and Their Readerships, 2019
Producing published research is an endeavour filled with risks, especially from the perspective of novice writers of scientific research articles (hereafter RA). This research project focuses on the environment of scientific research, where there is often little explicit guidance given to early-career academics in language skills surrounding their work. Although the target audience of an RA are researchers in the area, the risks and success involving its publication depend on the relationship between writers and their initial evaluative readers. Journal editors and reviewers represent crucial readers in view of their contribution to enhancing the RA as it evolves from the point of submission towards an unconditional final acceptance. Communication between RA writers and corresponding editors and reviewers reflects a fundamentally interpersonal issue. Lack of experience, awareness and understanding of the entire publication process among novice writers leads to challenges in negotiation and problematic outcomes at the production level. A significant problem for such researchers is the common assumption that a journal research article (RA) is a single, finished text, instead of recognising it as the culmination of a largely dialogic process which itself comprises a macro genre (as per Martin (English text. System and structure. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1992), understood as an interlocking set of genres which operate with an overriding social purpose).
Peer Feedback in Disciplinary Writing for Publication in English: The Case of ‘Rolli’,
Achieving publication in Anglophone science journals is a goal of many multilingual scholars, and failure can have huge implications for individuals’ future careers and for the global dissemination of scientific knowledge. Despite the importance of the topic, there is still a lack of bottom-up research, which investigates the experience of writing for publication in English from the perspective of the novice scholar. This article presents the case of ‘Rolli’, a German-L1 novice scholar facing the challenge of writing his first article for publication as the lead author and writing it moreover in English. The study uses text history, interviews, and feedback comments to portray the socially-situated story of a novice multilingual writer on a trajectory to successful publication. The case shows how peer feedback was pivotal in achieving publication. Rolli’s ability to respond to this feedback was a key success factor in the writing for publication process. The case sheds light on the importance of peer feedback in disciplinary writing.
Academic Writing Conventions Traveling by Negotiation with Reviewers
FIGURAS REVISTA ACADÉMICA DE INVESTIGACIÓN
Accomplishing a publication in English represents a challenge for scholars in Mexico (Hanauer and Englander 2011; Diaz-Sosa and González-Videgaray 2019, 39), where Spanish is the national language and academic writing mentors are scant. Like Bal (2002), this narrative explores the concept of Academic Writing Conventions (AWCs) in English as an additional language that traveled through interactions between a Mexican scholar and reviewers of research articles for publication. The narrative allowed the researchers to identify the AWCs concept based on the analysis of the narrated data gathered from the Mexican scholar, while trying to fulfill the AWCs in order to publish in English, and the comments provided to standardize academic writing in English for the international disciplinary community through the revision tool in Word by the reviewers. This main AWCs concept involved grammar, rhetorical structure, clarity, and style. In conclusion, AWCs are a differing concept traveling disci...
Author's editor revisions to manuscripts published in international journals
English as Additional Language (EAL) scholarly writers have to overcome numerous obstacles to meet the expectations of editors and peer reviewers before they can publish their research articles in international journals published in English. A number of shapers (Burrough-Boenisch, 2003) are often involved in revising such articles before their eventual publication. This study focuses on the revision changes made by an author's editor to a corpus of such articles leading up to their eventual publication. Based on textual analysis of the early drafts and published manuscripts of 15 SCI-indexed journal articles by Chinese doctoral students, a double-entry coding scheme was developed to describe 5160 revision changes made to the manuscripts, in terms of five types of revision, i.e., substitution, correction, addition, deletion, and rearrangement, and four different lexico-grammatical levels, i.e., morpheme, word, group and clause/clause complex. With the exception of correction, a category which applies to surface-level errors (which do not affect meaning), and is the second most frequent category of changes, all of the other categories represent changes which often substantially alter the meanings of the texts and which involve negotiation between the editor and the writer. The theoretical and pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed with reference to previous studies focusing on revision changes and to debates concerning English as a Lingua Franca franca and World Englishes.