Niina Hynninen

“It’s so natural to mix languages” : Attitudes towards English-medium instruction in Sweden

“It’s so natural to mix languages” : Attitudes towards English-medium instruction in Sweden

Exploring regimes of academic writing: introduction to the special issue

Writing is pervasive in the context of higher education. Scholars write various kinds of texts for research, teaching as well as administrative purposes, and students are required, for example, to produce much of their course work in writing. This pervasiveness of writing in academia has not gone unnoticed by researchers, and abundance of research exists on academic writing from various perspectives, both drawing on text-oriented approaches (for overviews, see e.g. Bazerman and Prior 2004; Hewings 2001)and those that are more focused on the contexts and practices of writing (for developments in the field, see e.g. Juzwik et al. 2006). This special issue is a contribution to the more contextualised approaches; it draws particularly on academic literacy (e.g. Barton and Hamilton 2000; Lillis and Scott 2007) and the sociolinguistics of writing (e.g. Blommaert 2013; Lillis 2013; Lillis and McKinney 2013). In the contributions, writing is treated as observable practice, a process that takes place under specific material conditions, in interaction with various ‘literacy brokers’ (Lillis and Curry 2006), and within particular disciplinary and organisational frames. The seeds of this special issue, entitled ‘Regimes of Academic Writing’, are in a colloquium I co-organised with Anna Solin and Janus Mortensen at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 21 in Murcia, Spain, in 2016. The focus is on the writing practices of researchers and students, and in particular, on how these practices both shape and are shaped by specific regimes of writing that regulate writers’ choices of language and genre, as well as the kind of language the writers may use in specific settings and for specific genres. The contributions draw on data collected at universities in the UK, Denmark, Finland and Sweden, and approach the theme of the special issue from different perspectives. A key concept is ‘language regime’, which Kroskrity (2000) uses to draw attention to connections between language, ideologies, politics and identity. Language regimentation in this view is a means to control the ways in which people use language. In research on language policy and planning, this regimentation has often been associated with, above all, questions of choice between languages in different situations, or as Liu (2015: 137) puts it, ‘which languages can be used when and where’. For instance, Gazzola defines a language regime as a ‘particular form of public policy’ (2014: 2), a ‘set of rules and arrangements implemented to manage multilingual communication, typically as regards to the choice of official languages of an organisation and their respective use’ (2014: 10). Similarly, Coulmas (2005: 7) defines a language regime ‘as a set of constraints on individual language choices’. Gazzola (2014) applies the concept to any form of organisation, emphasising the importance

Regulating the language of research writing: disciplinary and institutional mechanisms

Abstract This paper concerns the regulation of second language research writing, particularly from the point of view of how English language writing is managed and intervened in. We approach the topic through a case study conducted at a computer science department in a large Nordic university. Drawing on interviews with researchers and administrative staff working in the setting, as well as document data, we explore (1) what kinds of institutional, top-down mechanisms can be identified which regulate English language research writing and (2) how regulation is enacted in the form of interventions into research texts as part of the writing practices of research groups. The analysis draws on the Academic Literacies paradigm and the sociolinguistics of writing. We analyse both the way in which research writing is affected by disciplinary conventions and expectations and the way in which institutional constraints and affordances impact writing. The findings show a lack of top-down mechanisms regulating writing; disciplinary pressures seemed to matter more to writers than institutional ones.