The Diachronic Influences on the Production of Scholarly Texts in English

Abstract

One area of social behaviour is communication; how members of a social grouping communicate their ideas and beliefs to one another. Language is one way of doing this and for Kecskes a native-like knowledge of language is “knowing preferred ways of saying things and preferred ways of organising thoughts”. For him these ‘preferred ways’ are “culture and language specific” (Kecskes, 2015, p. 113). And as the things we say reflect how the speech community we belong to thinks about the world and the environment this poses a difficulty for non-native speakers of hoping to learn and function in that language. Although there has been a lot of research and debate into defining the nature, importance and place of culture in second language teaching and learning (see for example; Kramsch, 1998; Risager, 2007), little focus has been given to the difficulties English as an additional language (EAL) scholars face when writing in English and publishing in international journals (see for example, Flowerdew, & Li, 2007; Luo, & Hyland, 2019). This paper aims to present an argument against the seemingly unstoppable monopoly of English language scholarly publications, by adopting a different perspective on some previous research into academic writing.

Keywords

• scholarly writing
• eal
• academic publications in english
• writer identity
• the culture language nexus