Introduction to the Spanish national team for intercultural studies of academic discourse (ENEIDA) project and research group

Abstract

In recent decades, there has been a growing move towards publication in English-medium journals among multilingual researchers and a growing demand for materials (Swales and Feak, 2004) and courses in skills relevant to publishing in English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) (Moreno 2011). Research into academic writing has also flourished world-wide (Swales 2004), with crosscultural and intercultural studies of academic discourse across various languages and English being an area of increasing interest (Moreno 2010). Despite this, little is known about the training needs vis-à-vis ERPP of writers for whom English is an Additional Language (EAL) and how teaching resources might best address them (Swales 2002). The present project focusses on a neglected population of EAL writers, Spanish researchers, and advocates for a critical pragmatic approach that addresses access and difference simultaneously. Thus the project highlights the importance of giving priority to those aspects of ERPP writing with which specific groups of Spanish researchers tend to have difficulties when communicating with an international audience (the intercultural perspective). Additionally, based on revealing results from Spanish-English crosscultural studies of academic discourse, the project seeks to explain some of Spanish researchers’ writing problems by virtue of the contrastive rhetoric hypothesis, according to which writers from different cultural and language backgrounds have distinct preferences for articulating messages with share a similar purpose (the crosscultural perspective). It is believed that raising Spanish researchers’ awareness of crosscultural differences in ERPP writing related to audience types (national/local versus international) will help them to produce more successful texts in the eyes of English-medium journal gatekeepers. Convinced that this type of research would benefit from interdisciplinary collaborations, the ENEIDA (Spanish team for Intercultural Studies of Academic Discourse) research group was officially set up in 2010. It consists of researchers with background and expertise in supplementary research fields from one Spanish research-only institution (the CSIC), four Spanish universities (Universidad de León, Universidad de La Laguna, Universitat Jaume I and Universidad de Zaragoza) and three foreign universities (The University of London, The University of Michigan and the Open University). The first phase of the ENEIDA project on “Rhetorical Strategies to Get Published in International Journals from a Spanish-English Intercultural Perspective (I)” (Ref.: FFI2009-08336) sets out to collect relevant data to investigate Spanish researchers’ writing difficulties publishing in English-medium international journals and to carry out various needs analyses vis-à-vis ERPP by means of a large-scale confidential online survey. The present paper justifies the need for carrying out the ENEIDA project and for bringing the ENEIDA research group together.