The communication problems of Spanish researchers to get research articles published in Applied Linguistics English-medium journals: proposal and analysis

Abstract

This paper is a revised version of a three-hour seminar given in Spanish at the VIII Semana de la Ciencia en Madrid, Spain, 18 November 2008, under the title: ¿Es el discurso científico universal en su contenido y forma?. The purpose of this seminar was to introduce a non-specialised audience to a relatively new field of research within Applied Linguistics, known as Intercultural Rhetoric. This research field mainly seeks to describe and explain the communication problems encountered by writers for whom English is an additional language when they express their ideas in some genre (usually in English) in order to communicate with an international audience. It also aims to identify the main accommodations that are necessary for these writers to be successful. In the present seminar I focus on the academic genre known as the research article in English and on one neglected population of writers: Spanish researchers, in one particular academic discipline, Applied Linguistics (AL). In order to situate the types of communication problems Spanish researchers in AL experience when operating in this genre, I first describe the context in which these problems can be best detected, the review process of a manuscript submitted for publication in journals of this discipline. Then, based on a small corpus of reports from peer reviewers in AL, I give account of various types of communication problems which make it necessary for Spanish authors in AL to revise their manuscripts and I discuss the most difficult problems to repair. The framework of analysis that I propose first distinguishes between problems with language form versus problems with language content/discourse conventions. It also distinguishes between general communication problems, problems specific to scientific communication and intercultural communication problems. Finally, based on previous empirical Spanish-English contrastive studies of academic discourse which reveal relevant crosscultural rhetorical differences, I launch the hypothesis that that such differences in rhetoric might account for some of the communication problems observed in the peer review process of this small sample of manuscripts. This paper can be cited as follows: Moreno, A. I. (2012). The communication problems of Spanish researchers to get research articles published in Applied Linguistics English-medium journals: proposal and analysis. URL: https://buleria.unileon.es/handle/10612/1756 [06/06/2012]