Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, University of Nizwa
This recent publication on second-language writing in academic contexts brings together three strands of research: acquiring academic writing skills, characteristics of second-language writing, and themes relating to writer identity.
In the first section, themes related to the status of English as an international language of academia and research are explored. The first contribution describes the implementation of a program to train mid-career Chinese scientists to write up research in English at a standard appropriate for publication. By making writing and publication practices explicit, the program appears to bolster the participants’ confidence in their ability to publish internationally. The second contribution describes the use of electronic corpus analysis in training second-language writers to perceive semantic and discursive characteristics of reporting verbs as they appear in different sections of an article. The topic of reporting verbs is taken up later in the text in an examination of how reader presence or stance may be expressed through the choice of a reporting verb.
Chinese student feedback preferences comprise the subject of the following study. Despite previous positive experience with peer feedback, the undergraduate students included in the study express preferences for teacher feedback, the reasons for which may be partly cultural. The final contribution in this section examines the social context in which doctoral students undertake the writing of their dissertation; rather predictably, time management and motivational issues are highlighted, but also supervisory concerns owing to the potentially conflicting expectations held by many (particularly international) students regarding the role of their supervisor.
The second section opens with an analysis of conclusions to PhD theses, which identifies the heterogeneity of how a concluding section is structured and formulated across various disciplines. A study that follows addresses shell nouns, pointing to the narrower range of functions of this type of noun in writing produced by highly proficient undergraduate second-language writers when compared to their peers writing in their first language. This section closes with a study of the use of graphs and other visuals in the work of non-native speaking students at British universities, which, as the author demonstrates, constitute an important channel to convey key information among this group of students in particular.
The final section, ‘identity work’, opens with a descriptive, reflective study of graduate-level students with highly proficient language skills in multiple languages, and how such bi- or multilingual speakers label themselves and respond to labels imposed upon them. The final chapter (from the editor) explores the many benefits that scholars bring to international research communities through insider knowledge of different cultural practices and academic traditions.
This is a professionally produced compendium of different voices and topics, which provides graduate students and scholars with an overview of current themes in second-language writing research.