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Previous quantitative studies suggest that the burden researchers who use English as an additional language perceive when writing research articles (RAs) for publication in English (as L2) is 24% greater than the burden they perceive when they write RAs for publication in their L1. It remains unclear precisely which aspects of research article (RA) writing in English present these writers with the greatest challenge and just why they perceive this increase in difficulty. A structured questionnaire comprising thirty-seven questions about researchers’ publication experiences in scientific journals in English and in Spanish was designed and sent out to all (n = 8,794) Spanish postdoctoral researchers at one research-only institution and four universities in Spain, yielding responses from 1,717 researchers. Our first results show that the discussion is the section that is perceived as more difficult to write for English-medium journals, across the four broad knowledge areas in a way that cannot be fully explained by their lower level of proficiency in English (as L2). This article proposes the rhetorical transfer hypothesis as a possible explanation for their additional difficulty. Our results also reveal that their increased perceived difficulty writing RA discussions in English (as L2) does not decrease noticeably until Spanish researchers report high or very high levels of proficiency in English (as L2) for academic or general purposes or have published on average at least 37 RAs as corresponding author in English-medium journals over the last ten years. Implications for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) research and pedagogy are discussed.

This paper proposes a framework for the comparative study of researchers’ motivations for publishing either in English as an additional language or their first language. This framework seeks to present a view of motivation as dynamic, multidimensional, and multilevel. Empirical support is provided through the results of an on-line large-scale survey carried out among Spanish scholars. Our aim was to investigate which factors motivate them to publish their results in academic journals in either English or Spanish, as well as the extent to which these motivations are shaped by individual characteristics of researchers, particularly gender, seniority and publication experience. Results show an instrumental use of publication in English and fragmented social and ideological motivations for the use of Spanish.

Over the last few decades, researchers have increasingly published their research in English-medium scientific journals, mainly because of their greater prospects for international recognition and career promotion. Of all possible academic genres, the research article continues to be the pre-eminent genre of the academy, and the empirical research article is the most relevant for Spanish scholars. Discussion and/or other Closing (DC) sections in this subgenre in English-medium journals are especially difficult for social scientists to write when English is not their first language. This intercultural rhetoric research explores the possible negative transfer of their research promotional behaviour in Spanish when they write DC sections for publication in English. Drawing on recent strengthened move analysis methodology and employing quantitative and qualitative methods, I compared the extent to which authors writing in English and in Spanish as L1 promote their own research in DC sections. To do so, I systematically annotated ten pairs of comparable DC sections from the Exemplary Empirical Research Articles in English and Spanish Corpus for their communicative functions which, for the first time, were validated by the article authors themselves. Additionally, I used an online survey to understand their promotional behaviour better. This innovative methodology confirmed that the writers in the study were more promotional in English than in Spanish. In particular, authors in English highlighted more positive aspects of their studies and applications of their results while in Spanish they were more neutral and focused largely on statements of contribution and relevance to the zeitgeist. It was also found that the inclusion of specific rhetorical steps was affected by different levels of culture (unstated general communication norms, reviewing and socialisation processes, as well as research assessment policies). These findings demonstrate how social scientists’ promotional approaches are complex and merit further attention. Implications for the teaching of academic writing in English for publication purposes are drawn.

This compilation consists of 20 empirical research articles, 10 in English and 10 in Spanish, which are highly comparable. They have been drawn from the EXEMPRAES Corpus (Author, 2013, June). The RAs belong to the following SSC disciplines: Pedagogy, Psychology, Sociology, Business, and Economics. Reference: Moreno, A. I. (2013, June). Compiling comparable corpora of research articles for writing teaching purposes through interdisciplinary collaboration. Paper presentation at the 7th Conference of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing. Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

[EN] This paper proposes a framework for the comparative study of researchers’ motivations for publishing either in English as an additional language or their first language. This framework seeks to present a view of motivation as dynamic, multidimensional, and multilevel. Empirical support is provided through the results of an on-line large-scale survey carried out among Spanish scholars. Our aim was to investigate which factors motivate them to publish their results in academic journals in either English or Spanish, as well as the extent to which these motivations are shaped by individual characteristics of researchers, particularly gender, seniority and publication experience. Results show an instrumental use of publication in English and fragmented social and ideological motivations for the use of Spanish. [ES] Este trabajo propone un marco para el estudio comparativo de las motivaciones de los investigadores a la hora de publicar en inglés o en su lengua materna. Dicho marco tiene por objeto ofrecer una visión dinámica, multidimensional y multinivel de la motivación. Los resultados de este trabajo provienen de una encuesta on-line a gran escala realizada entre investigadores españoles. Nuestro principal objetivo es investigar los factores que motivan a los investigadores a la hora de publicar en revistas académicas, ya sea en inglés o en español, así como el grado en que estas motivaciones son moldeadas por determinadas características individuales, especialmente el género y la experiencia investigadora y en publicación. Los resultados muestran un uso instrumental del inglés con fines académicos frente a una visión del empleo del castellano más fragmentada y basada en motivaciones sociales e ideológicas.

"Published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing". Con autorización de la editorial para este capítulo., English is currently used as a lingua franca for communication among speakers of varied linguacultural context in many professional fields, and the academic one is not an exception. Scholars are required —to a different extent across disciplinary fields— to disseminate the results of their research in English-medium publications, which allows them to enter international debates and research networks. In this context, non-native academics, for whom English was not their language of instruction and who have lacked specific training in developing written academic literacies, find quite a lot of difficulties. This situation has generated a lot of research in English for Academic Purposes taking and intercultural rethoric perspective, comparing writing conventions and discursive features in research articles and other academic genres, in English published internationally and in parallel text published locally in other languages. More recently, research has also looked at variations in genres written in English by scholars from different language and cultural backgrounds, mainly Anglophones vs non-Anglophones. In addiction, research has also been carried out into the extent of use of English in several academic contexts and the scholars' attitudes, perceptions and views towards its international role (e.g., Petersen and Shaw 2002; Duszak and Lekiwicz 2008; Flowerdew and Li 2009). Several such studies have also been recently undertaken in the Spanish context (e.g., Fernández Polo and Cal Varela 2009; Pérez-Llantada et al 2010; Ferguson et al 2011)., The research presented in this chapter contributes to the exploration of current practices of Spanish Scholars when publishing their research outcomes internationally English. In particular, we seek to unveil the most commonly reported problems and strategies used by Spanish scholars in the writing processes toward publication when working in two fields: Chemistry and Business. The research is based on data grawn from ENEIDA database, obtained through an online survey (Moreno et al. 2013) answered by 1,717 Spanish scholars at five Spanish institutions. We will focus on the results obtained from questions enquiring about their beliefs about the effect of their mother tongue on the evaluation of their text, their particular experiences in publishing international research articles in English, particular difficulties in the drafting of their texts, the writing used —particularly in terms of the "literacy brokers" (Lillis and Curry 2010) they resort to— the effort they put into and the satisfaction gained as a result, and their perceived needs in the development of strategies to improve their academic writing skills., The two disciplines can be considered rather internationalised in that a great deal of research is produced and consumed in English, although to varying degrees in each of them. Whereas Business Spanish scholars still publish research in Spanish with a more local readership in mind, Spanish Chemistry scholars consider that all research has to be necessarily reported in English. The different degree of internationalisation of the fields of study brings with it different rhythms in the enculturation processes for international communication in English and also different difficulties and uses of writing strategies. The results obtained from the survey have important pedagogical implications with regard to the needs of Spanish scholars in the two fields. Also, the implications regarding the progressive consolidation of English as a lingua franca in different disciplinary contexts will be considered., The study is part of the project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ref: FFI2009-09336/FILO), of which Dr. Ana I. Moreno is the Principal Investigator.

Forthcoming book chapter, In academic journal book reviewing, critical comments on the book under review (henceforth critical comments) can be considered potential face-threatening acts (FTAs). Given the especial interpersonal conflict potentially caused by assessing the work written by a peer in a public context, it may be wise for reviewers to mitigate their force. In the present paper we focus on a politeness strategy, i.e. giving reasons, which commonly serves reviewers to redress the force of the FTA potentially caused. We aim to provide insight into the extent to which scholars from different but comparable writing cultures justify their critical comments with supporting reasons, thus helping them to manage the potential interpersonal conflict created. Our empirical comparison is based on two comparable corpora of academic book reviews of literature, 20 written in Anglo-American English, and 20 in Castilian Spanish. The results show that, while reviewers in the two corpora offer a substantial amount of unjustified critical comments, these are proportionally more frequent in the Spanish corpus. Also, while the Anglo-American reviewers are more inclined to justify negative critical comments than positive ones, this tendency is opposite for the Castilian Spanish reviewers. A semi-structured e-mail questionnaire is piloted to see whether responses from reviewers to an open-ended question on these issues could reveal any explanatory information. Implications for English for Academic Purposes are drawn.

This paper was presented at the InterLAE Conference, organised by Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain), Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana (http://www.unizar.es/interlae/conference08.html) in JACA on 11-13 December 2008, Reviewing an academic book can be considered as a potential face-threatening act. The aim of the present paper is to provide insight into how scholars from different but comparable writing cultures manage the potential academic conflict caused by reviewing an academic book. Based on two comparable corpora of 20 academic book reviews of literature written in international English and 20 in Castilian Spanish, the paper compares the frequency and type of critical comments made by the reviewers on the book under review as a function of the size of the academic community the author of the book and the reviewer belong to. Critical comments are defined as positive or negative appreciations of a given aspect or sub-aspect of the book under review. They are identified, interpreted and measured in a way that takes the co-text and the rhetorical context into account, irrespective of their lexico-grammatical realisation. The results show that the Castilian Spanish writers of literary academic book reviews are much less critical in general and show a much lower tendency to evaluate the book negatively than their Anglo-American counterparts. Contextual information provided by the book review writers through an e-mail questionnaire supports the hypothesis that a close personal or professional relationship between the reviewer and the author of the book (or the prospect of it), which is more likely to happen in a small academic community, affects the way scholars manage the academic conflict potentially caused by reviewing a professional peer’s work., Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (HUM2005-01215)

Spanish scholars have begun requesting courses in skills relevant to publishing in English in order to enhance their chances of seeing their work accepted by international journals. I argue that it would be pedagogically useful to include tasks to raise their awareness of English-Spanish crosscultural variation in academic writing. To support this, more crosscultural research into academic discourses in English and Spanish using rigorous comparative designs is still necessary. After reviewing previous crosscultural studies, I suggest some features of methodology and research design that would allow us to yield increasingly comparable, reliable and explanatory findings on which practical teaching applications could usefully draw.

This chapter shows the importance of comparing corpora that are really comparable. The chapter conceives of texts as exemplars of situated genres and acknowledges that the rhetorical and discourse configuration of texts vary as a function of the contextual factors in which texts are situated. It argues that corpora may be considered equivalent (or similar to the maximum degree) across cultures to the extent that the text exemplars are similar in all of the relevant contextual factors. It concludes that cross-cultural corpora designs should attempt to control statistically as many of the relevant contextual factors as possible. If not, it may not be possible to say anything reliable about the possible effect of the language/culture factor on texts. Instead, possible differences found may be due to uncontrolled contextual variables.

In contrastive rhetoric research the concept of tertium comparationis or common platform of comparison is important at all levels of the design: in identifying texts for building comparable corpora, selecting textual concepts to be examined across the corpora, and identifying and distinguishing between different types of linguistic resources used to realize these concepts. The present paper proposes a model of contrastive rhetoric research that starts with building comparable corpora on the basis of relevant similarity constraints or factors (e.g. the genre, subject matter, the level of writers’ expertise, etc.) that might affect the expression of the textual concept(s) under comparison. Then the model proposes to establish common ground not only on the text functional and conceptual level but also on the text realization level for an adequate match of any two data sets before meaningful quantitative comparisons can take place. This kind of rigorous design is needed so that we can first have good baseline descriptions of given genres within given cultures and languages before we can compare and contrast features of those genres across cultures and languages. Using a study by Moreno (1998), we explain how such corpus-based quantitative studies can be designed and conducted with appropriate tertia comparationis from the corpus collection phase to the final analysis and interpretation., Plan Nacional de I+D+I (2000-2003). Ref: BFF2001-0112

Drawing on Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986; Blakemore, 1987, 1992) and takinginsights from Sinclair's (1993) model of written text structure, the purpose of this paper is toshow how and which cohesive features play an important role in helping the reader perceiverelevance and coherence when a text is approached in the process of reading. With this aim, acomment article from Guardian Unlimited consisting of 60 coherence units is analyzed by agroup of 25 subjects. The study seeks to capture the coherence pattem perceived by a discoursecommunity rather than by an individual researcher. The results show that in most cases thecohesive resources that contribute to the perception of the discourse relevance and coherence ofthis text at each juncture deal only with discourse meaning derived from whole sentences, largerfragments of text, or occasionally, certain simple clauses linked paratactically, and they do muchmore than effect a tenuous connection between isolated constituents of sentences.

Needs analysis has been generally considered as a typical feature of courses in English for Specific Purposes. However, knowing the purposes and reasons why a group of students needs to learn English should be the starting point of any English language curriculum, be it general or specific. The aim of the present paper is to carry out a needs analysis of the students taking a degree in English Philology at the University of León (Spain). The paper analyses and justifies the type of needs that should be taken into account in order to obtain objective and relevant information for the design of a task-based English language syllabus adequate to the needs of these particular learners. To collect data in relation to the groups' characteristics, the target situation demands and the learners' wants, lacks and learning needs, a questionnaire was administered to 103 students of courses in Lengua Inglesa II, III and IV. The paper reports and discusses the results obtained. On this basis, it has been possible to design more adequate curricula for these courses and choose, adapt and/or design course materials that are presumably more relevant to present students in this degree.

19 pages, 1 figures, 3 tables, 1 appendix., The present paper starts out by assuming that, despite a relative uniformity of research articles (RAs) imposed by the requirements of the genre, there will be significant intercultural variation in the rhetorical preferences of national cultures. Its aim is to find evidence for or against this assumption. To do so, it focuses on one micro-level feature of text rhetoric, the use of causal metatext (or text about text) in orienting readers in the interpretation of cause-effect intersentential relations (CEISRs). An empirical contrastive analysis of 36 RAs in English and 36 RAs in Spanish on business and economics written by native speakers of each language is carried out. In fact, the results show that both language groups seem to make CEISRs explicit with similar frequency. In addition, they use similar strategies for expressing CEISRs, as reflected in the amount of emphasis given to the causal relation, the basic mechanism of coherence used and the choice of peripheral or integrated signals. Moreover, those strategies appear similarly distributed. The only differences across the two languages are shown in their tendencies towards verbal or nominal anaphoric and anaphoric-cum-cataphoric signals. Thus, overall these results tend to suggest that it is the writing conventions of the RA genre, and not the peculiarities of Spanish and English writing cultures, that govern the rhetorical strategies preferred by writers to make the CEISR explicit and the frequency with which these are made explicit.