The responsibility of the native speaker scholar
Stephen Krashen
English has become the international language
of scholarship. In 1997, 95% of the
articles cited in the Science Citation Index were in English, up from 83% in
1977 (Garfied, 1998; Van Leeuwen, Moed, Tussen, Visser, and Van Raan, 2001),
and universities in non-English speaking countries often require that faculty
members publish in English (e.g. Curry, 2001).
This places a termendous burden on nonnative
speakers of English attempting to publish in English. It is imperative that we do something about
this, otherwise the wisdom and contributions of many nonnative speakers will be
lost to us.
Many nonnative scholars have acquired an
enormous vocabulary and a mastery of much of the academic style through
voluminous extensive reading, but there are a number of late-acquired aspects
of academic language that many have not fully acquired. These aspects of
language are often cosmetic, not contributing to meaning, but editors and reviewers
might be very sensitive to them.
A
suggestion
Those of us who are native speakers should
take some responsibility in helping nonnative English speaking colleagues
prepare research papers for publication. Nonnative speakers can often appeal to
local native speakers of English to proof-read their work, but such helpers
rarely have a knowledge of the discipline and its particular writing style. It
is up to us, those of us familiar with both, to help.
I suggest that each of us partner with at
least one colleague, a colleague whose work is relevant to and contributes to
our own, and volunteer our services for a limited amount of editing, perhaps
three to five pages per month.
We must pay a price for the advantage of being
a native speaker of a language that has become the international language of
scholarship.
Two
suggestions for making the task easier.
Shorter papers: Many (not all) professional
research papers are much longer than they need to be. Introductions need to be
shorter, only necessary citations included, and discussion sections should be
briefer, not repeating, what has already been stated in the paper (Krashen,
2012a). Many papers are written more in dissertation than journal style.
Eliminate jibberish: Alfie Kohn has pointed
out that:“Some scholars have slipped so far into the stylized
talk – excuse me, discourse – of academia that important ideas are rendered
virtually incomprehensible to most people. Because it sometimes seems that
scholarship is valued by other academics in direct proportion to its
inaccessibility, some individuals may have an instinctive aversion to writing
in simple sentences even if they could remember how to do so.” (Aflie
Kohn, 2003; Professors who profess.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/professing.htm)
The danger of jibberish is the difficulty of
finding relevant information in articles (Krashen, 2012b). Nonnative speakers, as well as the
rest of us, find them nearly impossible to read, and, of course to write. Plain, direct language, and papers that are as
short as possible, will mean mean less inauthentic work
and more authentic work for writers, readers, and, of course, those of us who
act as volunteer editors.
Not
ready for editing
Some of our colleagues may not be ready
for our help, and first need to read more academic papers in English: The kind
of service I am recommending is late-stage editing, making sure that the
cosmetic aspects of academic English are taken care of.
Private
services
A current solution is the use of paid
consultants, private companies that offer editing services. The problems with this solution include the
fact consultants are not always familiar with the academic style of the
writer's area, and the fact that these services are not available to everyone,
Even when they are available, it is often up
to the scholar to pay for them, which is difficult given the very modest
salaries in many research institution.
Sources:
Coury, J. 2001. English as a lingua franca in
the Brazilian academic community. http://www3.telus.net/linguisticsissues/linguafranca.htm
Krashen,
S. 2012a. Academic jibberish. RELC Journal. 43 (2): 283-285.
Krashen,
S. 2012b. A short paper proposing that we need to write shorter papers. Language
and Language Teacher (Azim Premji University). 1(2): 38-39.
van
Leeuwnen, T., Moed, H., Tussen, R., Visser, M. and van Raan, A. 2001. Language
biases in the coverage of the Science Citation Index and its consequences for
international comparisons of national research performance. Scientmetrics
51(1): 335-346.
