Abstract
In Brazil, as in much of the academic world, there is an increasing acknowledgement among scholars that their chances of having their research noticed by a geographically diverse scientific community increase when that research is communicated in English. At the same time, much like the majority of the world, the first language of Brazil is not English, which raises one question that heretofore has not been addressed in the context of that country: How do Brazilian scholars write their research articles in English? That question drove the initial phase of the exploratory study described in the present paper, and it is one that also led the authors to discover that one key agent in the publishing process in Brazilian academia is the dissertation/thesis supervisor. Questionnaire and interview data collected from students and supervisors at a Brazilian university suggest that student and lecturer alike see the need and value of specialized writing guidance, yet neither party seems to ascribe the role of “literacy broker” (a person who contributes to the development of a text intended for publication) to the thesis supervisor in any specific way. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are discussed.
Highlights
It is hardly controversial that English has established itself as the predominant language through which scholarly research is communicated around the world
The present research was carried out over a full academic year within the Department of Mechanical Engineering in a public university in the south of Brazil. This particular department was chosen as the focus of this initial exploratory study for a number of reasons, including underperformance in the production of published research articles, and because the second author had been recently charged with the task of improving the “internationalization” of the department, including international research publication
In order to recruit participants, the authors sent out a departmental email inviting postgraduate students and university lecturers to attend a brief information seminar to talk about a new initiative to help those parties in their English for Research PublicationPurposes (ERPP) efforts
Summary
It is hardly controversial that English has established itself as the predominant language through which scholarly research is communicated around the world. What is clear is that pressures for academics to publish their research are not limited to geographic regions in which English is the dominant first language. Irrespective of nationality or mother tongue, scholars around the world generally aim to publish (lest they perish) in the most prominent and widely-recognized journals in their individual fields, and more often than not, that means publishing in English. The challenges such scholars face, and the consequences those challenges cause, have been the subject of study for some time in what has been termed English for Research Publication. The seminal ethnographic work conducted by Flowerdew [3] among scholars in Hong Kong stands out as one of the first ERPP studies, with important findings, such as the preference for one-on-one tailored writing supervision over courses in EAP writing
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