First publications in refereed English journals: Diﬃculties, coping strategies, and recommendations for student training

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First publications in refereed English journals: Diﬃculties, coping strategies, and recommendations for student training

Yin Ling Cheung

English Language and Literature Academic Group, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore 637616, Singapore

Received 8 September 2008; received in revised form 31 July 2009; accepted 22 October 2009

Abstract

This research studies the first attempts by applied linguistics doctoral students in Hong Kong to publish their work in a refereed journal in English. Interviews were conducted with students to learn about their experience in the publication process. The interview data indicate that the applied linguistics doctoral students adopted specific strategies in tackling difficulties that arose in their publication efforts. The strategies included selecting areas of study which they were familiar with for their research, reading articles in past issues of targeted journals, and seeking assistance from their dissertation supervisors. All the interviewees received comprehensive comments and criticism from the reviewers and editors of English language journals, while an absence of comments was a characteristic of Chinese language journals. The doctoral students in this study felt that reviewers and editors of English language journals were sympathetic toward non-native English speaking writers with regard to their problems in grammar, language usage, and writing style. Some suggestions are made for informed teaching in EFL contexts and to better prepare applied linguistics doctoral students for effective writing for publication.

Keywords: Hong Kong applied linguistics students; Publication; Refereed journals

1. Introduction

Doctoral students in applied linguistics are advised to have academic publications in English, preferably refereed journal articles, by the time they enter the academic job market. In Hong Kong, for example, refereed journal papers written in English are often considered a prerequisite for tenure-track positions in universities.

However, despite the clear advice, many Hong Kong-born applied linguistics doctoral students in Hong Kong do not have publications when they graduate. While their China-born counterparts are more likely to have publications,¹these publications are often written in Chinese, and published in non-refereed journal articles

doi:10.1016/j.system.2009.12.012

E-mail address:[email protected]

1 The distinction between Hong Kong-born applied linguistics doctoral students and their China-born counterparts was made in terms of place of birth rather than residency.

System 38 (2010) 134–141

www.elsevier.com/locate/system

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published in mainland China. It appears, therefore, that to these students, getting their ﬁrst refereed journal paper published in English is a major challenge. There is a need to identify eﬀective strategies for the students to overcome the challenge, given the importance of these publications in the career of an aspiring scholar.

What enables doctoral students to publish their ﬁrst refereed journal article in English deserves research attention.

2. Literature review

Getting a scholarly article published is a complex process. It involves gaining entry into a particular discourse community, engaging in legitimate peripheral participation, and making good use of situated knowledge. A theoretical framework encompassing the discourse community, legitimate peripheral participation, and the situated construction of knowledge will serve as a foundation for the current investigation.

Swales (1990)defines a discourse community, or a community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), as a group of people who share a set of social conventions that is geared towards some purposes. Spe- cifically,Swales (1990: 24–27)lists six criteria for a discourse community: (i) common goals, (ii) participatory mechanisms, (iii) information exchange, (iv) community-specific genres, (v) highly specialized terminology, and (vi) a high level of expertise.Flowerdew (2000)suggests that“an individual has to learn the conventions that underpin Swales’s six criteria in order to become a member in a discourse community”(p. 129). In Hong Kong, applied linguistics doctoral students gain entry into the discourse community of scholars (e.g., professors and fellow students) who participate in their Ph.D. programs. The students engage in informal participatory mechanisms such as attending workshops on writing research papers, interacting with senior researchers and fellow graduate students, and attending conferences; or in formal participatory mechanisms such as enrolling in writing classes for course credits. In terms of information exchange with fellow researchers, activities might include giving presentations at conferences, reading and analyzing academic research papers, completing writing assignments, and completing their dissertations. The types of writing, in particular, are community-specific genres through which the students serve their academic apprenticeship in the English language.

In Hong Kong, since publications are not a requirement for graduation in applied linguistics Ph.D. programs, many doctoral students remain novices with regard to the publication process throughout their graduate student careers. On the other hand, those students who do aspire to publish journal papers have to familiarize themselves with the conventions of their discourse community, and create and communicate knowledge according to its conventions. Their entry into the discourse community of scholars who guard and determine the publication process can be seen as a process of “centripetal participation in the learning curriculum of the ambient community” (Lave and Wenger, 1991, pp. 100). This type of learning is what Lave and Wenger (1991, pp. 100–1)call legitimate peripheral participation. It is“legitimate” because it is a prerequisite for applied linguistics doctoral students to be treated as potential members of the discourse community. It is “peripheral” because the students are likely to be still at the margins, as opposed to the center, of the scholarly writing world. Finally, “participation” means that the students acquire knowledge in publishing refereed journal papers through active and hands-on involvement in the process.

Flowerdew (2000, p. 131) points out that Hong Kong graduate students may learn the conventions of scholarly writing in English through various opportunities for peripheral participation, such as working with senior researchers, submitting articles for publication, communicating and negotiating with journal reviewers and editors, and interacting with their dissertation supervisors. Cho (2004) emphasizes that the comments and feedback given by dissertation advisors are crucial in guiding the graduate students in manuscript preparation. In addition, Cho (2004, p. 65) states that non-native English speaking (NNES) graduate students who are legitimate peripheral participants are “inducted into discourse communities through apprenticeship within what Vygotsky (1986) calls zones of proximal development”. Speciﬁcally, Vygotsky proposes that children have an actual developmental level as well as a potential developmental level in any domain. The actual developmental level refers to activities that the children can perform on their own

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without assistance from teachers or adults; the potential developmental level refers to activities that the children can perform only with assistance from teachers or adults. This diﬀerence between the two levels is called the zone of proximal development. Within the zone of proximal development, children and adults work together on tasks that the children cannot perform independently because of the diﬃculty level. In other words, the zone of proximal development is the area where children can achieve a goal, but do so in partnership with supporting adults. In this study, we can use “children” as a literal metaphor for applied linguistics doctoral students in the discourse community of publishing papers in refereed journals, and “support from adults” to represent the assistance of the students’ dissertation supervisors in the publication process. In other words, it is a particular type of novice-expert relationship: It is possible for applied linguistics doctoral students to achieve the goal of publishing refereed academic papers with the support and guidance of their dissertation supervisors.

It is clear from the above that novice NNES applied linguistics doctoral students in Hong Kong occupy marginal positions in the discourse community of scholarly publication. Nevertheless, their local knowledge and situated voice do oﬀer a“unique, valid, and responsible insider perspective”in the discourse community (Cho, 2004, p. 52).“The knowledge NNES researchers bring with them from their countries of origin”helps them act as cultural insiders and enables them“to view the context of their NNES countries from an outsider, critical point of view” (Cho, 2004, pp. 60–61). Thus, novice NNES applied linguistics doctoral students may be at a better position to oﬀer both emic and etic perspectives of the issues being studied in a particular discourse community.

The literature outlined above provides us with a framework that underlies the current investigation. Since it is important for graduate students to publish refereed journal papers in English before entering the academic job market, they should learn speciﬁc strategies to overcome the diﬃculties hindering such publication. With this goal in mind, the present study addresses two questions:

(1) What speciﬁc strategies have applied linguistics doctoral students taken to overcome the diﬃculties of getting their work published?

(2) What speciﬁc diﬀerences exist between the kinds of comments and feedback from reviews provided by journals published in Chinese and English?

3. Context and data source

The reported research was carried out within a broader project that sought to develop an understanding of the perceptions, problems, strategies, and training of Hong Kong applied linguistics doctoral students in writing refereed journal papers. The data sources of the research included participants’ various drafts and ﬁnal versions of their ﬁrst refereed journal papers, reviewers’ comments on the participants’ papers, my correspon- dence with the journal editors, mission statements of the journals, and the contents/themes of particular journal issues in which the published papers appear. These sources of data, although not detailed in this article, can be regarded as a form of triangulation that informed the questions posed in the interviews and the subsequent data analysis.

The research sites were three public universities in Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Participants of the study were four females and two males who came from China. At the time of the study, they were at diﬀerent stages of pursuing their doctoral degrees in their universities. One participant had not started data collec- tion for her research and was still in the stage of literature survey for her research proposal; one had already started working on her data analysis; and four of them were ﬁnishing up their dissertations.

The participants’ research interests were diverse. They included language learning strategies, second language learning motivation, socio-cultural theory, English vocabulary acquisition, corpus linguistics, and spoken discourse analysis.

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The data used in the present study were collected from in-depth interviews with the six abovementioned doctoral students. The interview questions were adopted from Flowerdew (1999, pp. 263–4).²Using email addresses posted at the websites of various Departments of English and English Centres in universities in Hong Kong, where applied linguistics programs are offered, I identified and contacted 68 individuals from this population. Within two weeks, eighteen of them responded. Twelve individuals were not qualified because they had no publications. I emailed each of the remaining six participants inquiring about the number of papers they had published in refereed journals. Each of them had one paper written in English and published in a refereed journal. Thus, the participants could share their experience in getting their work published for the first time. The interviews took place and were recorded in coffee shops on campus, a study room in the university’s library, and the office of one of the interviewees. The interviewees were told at the beginning that longer and more detailed responses were preferred. They were asked to answer in English throughout the interviews. I believed that the interviewees were capable in oral English communication, because English is the official medium of instruction in the universities in Hong Kong. Upon request by the interviewees, however, Mandarin or Cantonese was allowed to be used in the follow-up questions and responses, although no one opted to use their mother tongue in these discussions. The duration of an interview ranged from 60 min to 90 min. I sent copies of the interview transcripts to the interviewees to verify that the recorded information was accurate, and only two participants used this opportunity to correct minor grammatical errors.

4. Data analysis

The interviews were all recorded and transcribed verbatim. With regard to data analysis, I conducted coding in terms of the episodic unit (Brice, 2005; Grant-Davies, 1992; Lincoln and Guba, 1985). The episodic unit continued as long as an interviewee continued to make the same kind of comments. In the right margin of the transcript, I wrote down the categories of the units. I applied one code per episodic unit. For example, I assigned a category of“Seeking assistance in preparing a paper”to a received response of“I asked my super- visor to read my draft.”I developed a set of categories for the interviews. I assigned each interviewee a num- bered code, namely P1–P6. Then, I grouped the interviewees’ responses within the afore-mentioned categories that I had developed. Next, I further categorized the interviewees’ responses into groupings labeled as positive, negative, mixed, neutral, unsure, and unique responses. By comparing those subcategories, I was able to identify commonalities and idiosyncrasies in the responses.

5. Findings

5.1. Strategies to overcome the diﬃculties of research publication

All the interviewees selected areas of study they were familiar with for their dissertation topics, which rep- resented the most frequently used strategy for publishing their papers. The second most frequently mentioned strategy was reading past issues of targeted journals. The interviewees felt that they needed to gain informa-

2 I used the following list of questions in the interviews: Do you like writing in English for publication? What do you enjoy/not enjoy about it? What are your particular strengths in writing in English? How would you describe your written English? Can you describe your experience in getting published in a refereed journal for the ﬁrst time? Can you describe the process you went through in preparing a paper for publication in a refereed journal? Can you tell me what happened after the editor contacted you with his or her decision? Which parts of the academic article are most problematic/least problematic for you and why? Did you see any change after the handover of sovereignty in 1997? If so, what kind of change? Would you like to have more opportunities to write for publication in Chinese? Why/why not? What do you think are the typical problems of Hong Kong Chinese doctoral students in getting published in English in a refereed journal? What do you think are your own problems in writing in English for publication in a refereed journal? What are the particular problems when it comes to publishing in applied linguistics journals? Which parts of the paper do reviewers ask you to revise? Why? Do you feel at a disadvantage compared to native speakers when you submit a paper for publication. Why/why not? Do you think editors/reviewers are biased against non-native speakers? Why/why not? What strategies have you used in developing/improving your English writing? Do you seek help from anyone else when preparing a paper for publication? If yes who and in what capacity? What would be the best way for you to improve your academic writing in English if money and time were not a problem? Can you describe the existing support in training in research publication in research degree programs in your university? What do you think needs to be done by your university to strengthen the support in preparing doctoral students in Hong Kong when it comes to writing papers in English for publication?

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tion about the readership, the topics that had been published, and the predominant style of writing for a particular journal. Another strategy commonly used by the interviewees was to seek assistance from their dissertation supervisors. In the following excerpt, an interviewee explains how choosing a familiar area of study for his research had led to the acceptance of a paper on the research. His experience suggested that papers grounded in a local context while reaching out to a wider readership are good candidates for publication (interview excerpts are kept in the original):

My research is always about Hong Kong, or it’s about mainland China. They [the reviewers] want to know more about the context. . . Sometimes they [the reviewers] ask me to reveal a little more about myself, so I tell them a little bit about my background. I suspect that they want to know whether I am a real Chinese, or a foreigner who visits China and has this naive view of what’s going on. They [the reviewers] want to know the kind of authority I carry with the statements, the ﬁndings, and the arguments I made. . .Nowadays, because there is a growing interest in, for example, Chinese learners. People are interested in anything about China. Nowadays [my paper] could get accepted/published because there is a growing interest in China. (P3)

All the interviewees selected China as the local context of study for their research. A major reason for this choice was that the particular qualities of the research landscape in China enabled the interviewees to report situational findings that were locally valid. This statement is consistent with recent research results reported by, for example,Cho (2004)in terms of entering a discourse community through publishing in English, from the perspectives of NNES doctoral students in the United States. The knowledge that my interviewees brought with them from China offered a unique and valid cultural insider viewpoint, and allowed them to critically view the context from an outsider perspective. This point is illustrated by the following topics that appeared in the interviewees’ first refereed and published papers:

A study on the online narrative construction about a community of English learners on the Chinese mainland;

A study of diﬃculties and constraints in EFL learning in the Chinese university context;

Identity construction and investment transformation: college students from non-urban areas in China;

An investigation of the English vocabulary knowledge of university students in Hong Kong;

The communicative role of self-repetition in a specialized corpus of business discourse in Hong Kong;

The use of“well” as a discourse particle by Hong Kong non-native speakers of English in a TV current aﬀairs talk show.

Apart from choosing a familiar area of study for their research, the interviewees felt that it was important to read papers published in past issues of the journals that they targeted for their work. One interviewee said, “I’ll go through the journals, just go through year by year, what has been published, just to get to know the kind of interest of that particular journal readership.”Another interviewee commented that“after reading a lot of those journal articles, I learn basically the sort of writing style that I should use... When they [writers] describe this phenomenon in this area, what kind of words they [writers] would use.” Since having published journal papers was not a requirement for graduation in the interviewees’ applied linguistics programs, the skills related to writing for publication were not taught in formal classroom settings. Instead, in order to develop the required skills, my interviewees pored through papers in past issues of journals, in order to obtain a better understanding of the participatory mechanism, the use of highly specialized terminology, and community-speciﬁc genres produced by writers who had attained a high level of expertise in their discourse community. This statement is consistent with the research results reported by Flowerdew (2001)on the attitudes of journal editors to the contributions by non-native speakers. The would-be contributors need to read their targeted journals, since all journals have a characteristic style and conformance to the style will help publication. Hence, it is important for would-be contributors to familiarize themselves with the topics published in a journal, and they are advised to write in ways that the journal encourages.

Feedback on submissions from reviewers plays a major role in this process, and we will see that the quality of feedback diﬀers generally between English and Chinese language journals and indeed impacts the learning of novice authors.

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Besides reading past issues of journals and reviewers’ reports, seeking editorial assistance from dissertation supervisors was common among the interviewed applied linguistics doctoral students. One interviewee said,

“My supervisors read the drafts for my ﬁrst journal paper. I got quite a lot of feedback from my supervisors.”

Another interviewee said,“I send it [a draft of my ﬁrst journal paper] to my supervisors for comments. They [my supervisors] give me very good advice on how to improve the paper.”Members of a discourse community of journal publication have a common goal of sharing the latest research in their ﬁeld of study. The discourse community uses a participatory mechanism in which dissertation advisors, as members with a general high level of expertise, provide information and feedback to their advisees, who are legitimate peripheral and novice participants in the area. The advisees succeed in publishing through the assistance of the dissertation advisors.

In summary, for overcoming difficulties in publishing in refereed journals in English, the specific steps included selecting an area of study which the aspiring author is familiar with, reading past issues of the targeted journals, and seeking editorial assistance from dissertation supervisors. It is within this context that I shall briefly discuss the opinions of Hong Kong applied linguistics doctoral students on the differences between the kinds of comments and criticism received from paper reviews by Chinese and English (language) journals.

5.2. Comments and criticism received from reviews by Chinese and English (language) journals

When asked what they considered to be the main differences between the comments and criticism received from Chinese and English journal reviews, all the interviewees mentioned that they appreciated better the comments and criticisms given by the reviewers of international journals, which are typically published in Eng- lish. In fact, one interviewee noted an absence of comments as a specific characteristic of Chinese language journals. The difference in the quality of the reviewers’ feedback may arise because many reviewers for English language journals are established scholars and members of a discourse community possessing a high level of expertise in their fields. These reviewers are familiar with specialized terminologies and community-specific genres. Applied linguistics doctoral students will benefit from these reviewers’ comprehensive comments and suggestions for improving their manuscripts.

I benefit more from the experience in getting papers published in English. I mean I benefit more from this process than from publishing papers in Chinese. The major reason is in publishing or in getting my papers accepted in international journals I can learn more from the reviewers and the editors because everything’s open. Usually reviewers’ comments are quite comprehensive. In most cases, I am asked to revise every part because the comments are scattered here and there. I need to respond to the comments. The comments usually cover different parts. Even if my papers rejected I got comments. But back in mainland China, in most cases, I can’t get the reviews. They [Chinese language journals] will just let me know whether my papers rejected or accepted, or even I am without notice. If my papers rejected I get nothing.

When asked what speciﬁc comments and criticism he had received from reviewers for an English language journal, one interviewee mentioned issues pertaining to grammar, language usage, and writing style. In addition, through the feedback on his submission, he came to realize the kind of writing style expected by a particular journal. The observations suggest that the discourse of a particular community is co-produced by the manuscript authors and the journal reviewers:

I got two to three pages commenting I should change this to that in terms of grammar, or in terms of usage. . .This year, I managed to submit a paper to Journal X which asks people to write their draft in diﬀerent style. I only got to know that kind of writing style because it’s the reviewers who told me how to write, how to present the argument. . .

Further, the same interviewee pointed out a seemingly unique attribute possessed by typical reviewers and editors of English language journals:

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I think reviewers and the editors are sympathetic to us [non-native English speaking writers]. They are supportive to non-native English speaking writers. In my experience they [the reviewers and the editors]

are supportive and very sympathetic. Even though I have [grammar] problem in my writings, that kind of thing has been corrected. . .

Applied linguistics doctoral students in the current investigation learned how to write journal papers by communicating and negotiating with reviewers and editors of English language journals. That the interviewees did not mention problems in structuring arguments and making claims for their research with appropriate forcefulness did not mean that they had fewer problems with these issues than with language issues. Rather, the reason was that, before sending their manuscripts, the interviewees had already sought comments and assistance from their dissertation advisors. Dissertation advisors, in oﬀering advice on writing, tended to con- centrate on issues of argumentation, and paid less attention to language issues such as grammar, language usage, and writing style, since they believed that the latter issues would be resolved by a copy editor.

Having interview data from only six applied linguistics doctoral students, I do not have sufficient evidence to conclude that the majority of reviewers and editors are sympathetic toward novice NNES researchers with regard to their difficulties in writing. However, the data indicate that the students participating in this study benefited more from their experience in submitting papers to English language journals than to Chinese language journals. It is worth mentioning that most, if not all, applied linguistics journals published in China, in the Chinese language, are non-refereed. I consulted seven professors who were active applied linguists in China. Five of them mentioned that they did not know whether refereed journals published in Chinese existed in mainland China. One professor in Hong Kong (personal communication, June 26, 2008) mentioned that academics in mainland China were increasingly following the common practice of anonymous reviews in order to facilitate frank and critical remarks. One refereed journal adopting this practice is Modern Foreign Lan- guages published by Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in Guangzhou. However, this professor was unable to provide further information as regards which top mainland journals in applied linguistics followed the practice of peer review. Another professor in mainland China suggested that almost all applied linguistics journals claimed “refereed” status, but he doubted the true extent to which the submissions were peer- reviewed. Given that Chinese language journal papers are generally not peer-reviewed, the interviewees did not find publishing papers in Chinese language journals a rewarding experience, in terms of developing their expertise in a discourse community.

6. Summary and conclusion

This research studies the first attempts by Hong Kong applied linguistics doctoral students to get their work published in a refereed journal in English. The interview data indicate that applied linguistics doctoral students adopted specific strategies in tackling difficulties arising in their efforts. The strategies included selecting areas of study that they were familiar with for their research, reading articles in past issues of targeted journals, and seeking assistance from their dissertation supervisors. Whereas all the interviewees reported that they got comprehensive comments and criticism from reviewers/editors of the English language journals, the absence of comments was a characteristic of the Chinese language journals. The doctoral students in this study felt that reviewers and editors of the English language journals were sympathetic toward non-native English speaking writers with regard their difficulties with language issues including grammar, usage, and writing style.

Although it is difficult to estimate to what extent the findings about these applied linguistics doctoral students can be generalized to a larger population, insights from this study enable us to better understand applied linguistics doctoral students’ first attempts of publishing their work in a refereed journal in English.

Some suggestions could be made for informed teaching in EFL contexts, and to better prepare NNES applied linguistics doctoral students to negotiate through the writing-for-publication process. Since assistance and support by dissertation supervisors are important to doctoral students in their writing eﬀorts, more legitimate writing activities may need to be integrated into the mentoring process. Dissertation supervisors may suggest that their advisees collaborate in a group project, for example, a methodological review on a special topic. In this method, the supervisees might review existing papers on the topic, and then collaboratively write up a literature survey under the guidance of their advisors. The survey paper would then be submitted to a

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journal for consideration for publication. This type of hands-on learning with a tangible goal, conducted in a real-world setting, could provide a powerful impetus for the doctoral students in their work. Eventually, through suﬃcient practice, they could become independent and publish both on their own and in collaborative environments. In addition to assistance given informally by the dissertation supervisors, training in an academic program with formal evaluations and course credits may provide additional stimulus for the students to invest eﬀorts in English writing. Hence, we may consider integrating a foundation course on“scholarly writing for publication”into the regular Ph.D. curriculum. The course may teach basic writing skills and provide systematic knowledge about academic publishing and review processes. In the course, instructors may assign articles on scholarly writing, and have students discuss and analyze these articles. Furthermore, instructors may introduce applied linguistics doctoral students to professional organizations that provide publishing opportunities and keep the students informed about various potential publication venues.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and System Editor Norman Davies for their many helpful editorial comments, which have signiﬁcantly improved the quality of the paper.

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