Linguistics Circle Seminar

Abstract

In the last decades systems of evaluation of academic output have changed in many countries. For example, in Poland there was a requirement introduced by higher education reforms in 2011 to publish in top-tier journals, those indexed in Scopus and WoS in particular. Thus, on the one hand, scholars feel strong pressure to publish their research findings in prestigious journals. On the other, research shows that writers from this cultural region face many challenges in this area.

The talk aims to discuss the obstacles that writers for whom English is an Additional Language (EAL) encounter on their way to publish in peer-reviewed, highly-rated journals, and suggests some ways of overcoming them. It will be based on my research published in six articles (Hryniuk 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018a, 2018b, 2020) and a book (2019).

The challenges that are explored in this research derive mainly from the differences in academic writing conventions that the writers from non-Anglophone countries often follow. They concern, for example, the structure of research articles, the use of metalinguistic expressions, citations, authorial self or interpersonal metadiscourse markers (hedges and boosters). The presentation will also outline non-discursive problems that writers from semi-periphery countries, like Poland, must overcome in order to increase their chances of having their articles published in prestigious journals. Finally, because writing conventions themselves are changing and there is no agreement on their proper use, even between editors and reviewers, which confuses the writers, this will also be discussed.