Theresa Lillis

Professional academic writing by multilingual scholars: interactions with literacy brokers in the production of English-medium texts

Scholars around the world are under increasing pressure to publish their research in the medium of English. However, little empirical research has explored how the global premium of English influences the academic text production of scholars working outside of English-speaking countries. This article draws on a longitudinal text-oriented ethnographic study of psychology scholars in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal to follow the trajectories of texts from local research and writing contexts to English-medium publications. Our findings indicate that a significant number of mediators, “literacy brokers,” who are involved in the production of such texts, influence the texts in different and important ways. We illustrate in broad terms the nature and extent of literacy brokering in English-medium publications and characterize and exemplify brokers’ different orientations. We explore what kind of brokering is evident in the production of a specific group of English-medium publications—articles written and published in English-medium international journals—by focusing on three text histories. We conclude by discussing what a focus on brokering can tell us about practices surrounding academic knowledge production.

Ethnography as Method, Methodology, and "Deep Theorizing" Closing the Gap between Text and Context in Academic Writing Research.

This article critically explores the value of ethnography for enhancing context-sensitive approaches to the study of academic writing. Drawing on data from two longitudinal studies, student writing in the United Kingdom and professional academic writing in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal, the author illustrates the different contributions ethnography can make to researching academic writing, depending on the level at which it is construed, as method, methodology, or “deep theorizing.” In discussing the third level of ethnography, the author draws on recent debates around linguistic ethnography to explore how ethnography as deep theorizing can contribute to refining social practice accounts of academic writing through the specific notions of indexicality and orientation. By working through three levels of ethnography, her aim is to signal the ontological gap between text and context in academic writing research and to open up debate about how this gap can be narrowed.

New Voices in Academia? The Regulative Nature of Academic Writing Conventions

The opening up of higher education in Britain to groups previously excluded means that there is currently an opportunity for new voices to be heard in academia. However, the process whereby dominant academic linguistic conventions and practices mediate such voices is highly problematic, tending to constrain rather than open up the possibilities for meaning making. This paper examines specific instances in the struggle to make meaning in academic writing of a group of black bilingual women. Using case study material I focus firstly on the process whereby practices surrounding dominant conventions exclude them from participating in the liberal-conservative education project of higher education as currently organised in Britain. Secondly, I explore how such conventions constrain what they can say in their academic writing and thus how their voices are regulated. This involves examining how conventions regulate what they can say, how they can say it and who they can be. I conclude that there is a need to list...

An international journal’s attempts to address inequalities in academic publishing: developing a writing for publication programme

Scholars around the world are under increasing pressure to publish in English, in Anglophone centre journals. At the same time, research on professional academic writing indicates that scholars from outside Anglophone centre contexts face considerable obstacles in getting their academic work published in such journals, relating to material and linguistic resources. This paper draws on current research to offer a brief outline of inequalities arising from the privileged status of English and critically discusses the experiences of Compare: a journal of comparative and international education, in trying to tackle some of these inequalities in publishing through a mentoring programme. Recognising that many writers submitting to the journal have rich and original material, and that the established reviewing procedures do not readily accommodate the mentoring required to support submission (and eventual publication), the programme was designed to offer writers access to resources not easily (or necessarily readily) available: ‘expert insider’ knowledge from Compare editorial board members and reviewers and English textual commentary by ‘academic literacy’ facilitators. We outline key features of Compare’s ‘writing for publication’ programme and critically discuss both the success and difficulties encountered, drawing on reflections of participants, writer profiles and numbers of submissions from the three years in which the programme was run.

‘Getting it Write’ in social work: exploring the value of writing in academia to writing for professional practice

Writing plays a central role in social work practice and in the qualifying programmes studied by student social workers. The research on which this paper is based explores the value of writing undertaken in higher education to writing for professional practice in social work. Drawing on data sources from a ‘text oriented ethnography’, this paper explores the reflections of five recently qualified social workers making the transition from academic to professional practice. The significance of this study is heightened as social work practice and education are undergoing significant review at the time of writing. This review has identified the role of writing as important in both academic and practice domains. The paper suggests that there is currently no clear progressive link between academic writing in social work and the writing in practice required of graduate social workers. This paper offers some reflections on the implicit and explicit value of writing in an academic context to writing in professional practice.

Legitimizing Dialogue as Textual and Ideological Goal in Academic Writing for Assessment and Publication.

The semiotic world that we inhabit (within and outside the academy) is fast changing in terms of the resources that are used and the practices in which many engage. Yet the institutional norms governing highly consequential academic texts – students’ texts assessed as part of their disciplinary-based activity and scholars’ papers submitted for publication – lack engagement with this array of resources and, epistemologically, continue to drive a monologic stance towards academic meaning making. The aim of this article is to argue for a reconfiguring of the textual goal of academic writing, through one simple yet transformative tool, that of juxtaposition. Textual juxtaposition is illustrated in this article, and its intellectual and ideological value discussed, drawing on Bakhtin’s emphasis on dialogue, using several examples from published academic texts. The relevance to scholarly and student writing is explored.

Imagined, prescribed and actual text trajectories: the ‘problem’ with case notes in contemporary social work

Abstract Drawing on a text-oriented action research ethnography of the writing practices of UK-based social workers, this paper focuses on a key but problematic aspect of everyday, professional textual practice – the production of “case notes.” Using data drawn from interviews, workshops, texts and observation, the paper locates case notes within social work everyday practice and explores the entextualization of three distinct case notes. The heuristic of imagined, prescribed and actual trajectories is used to track specific instances of entextualization and to illustrate why the production of case notes is a particularly complex activity. A key argument is that in the institutional imaginary, and reflected in the institutionally prescribed trajectory, case notes are construed as a comprehensive record of all actions, events and interactions, prior to and providing warrants for all other documentation. However, they are in actual practice produced as parts of clusters of a range of different text types which, together, provide accounts of, and for, actions and decisions. This finding explains why case notes are often viewed as incomplete and raises fundamental questions about how they should be evaluated. The complexity of case notes as an everyday professional practice is underscored in relation to professional voice, addressivity and textual temporality.

Introduction: the dynamics of textual trajectories in professional and workplace practice

This Special Issue has two main aims. Firstly, it contributes to building a theoretical framework – drawing on relevant theoretical and empirical insights from sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, discourse and literacy studies – to address the propensity of texts to be transferred, transposed and transformed by a wide range of text makers and users (e.g. designers, disseminators, users, interpreters) across different contexts, with different resultant meanings, significance and effects. This framework problematizes the ways in which texts – understood as spoken, written and multimodal semiotic artifacts and phenomena – have been analyzed as discrete and boundaried units fixed in time and place. Secondly, it illustrates what a dynamic approach to textual analysis looks like, by offering detailed empirical tracking of text production and uptake in a number of professional and workplace domains – policing, social work, journalism, medical surgery, social housing. Taken together, the papers contribute to and extend the recent shift away from researching language-in-place to researching and conceptualizing the projection of language and text across different spatiotemporal contexts (Blommaert and Rampton 2011). We use the term “textual trajectories” in the title of the Special Issue to capture the growing theoretical and empirical impetus towards dynamic approaches to text analysis. In this issue we use “text” to mean spoken, written and multimodal semiotic artifacts and phenomena and “textual trajectories” as an overarching category to signal a cluster of related terms currently in use to capture the changes, movements and directionalities of texts – and relationships between these – across social space and time. This cluster includes terms such as trajectories (Blommaert 2005), text histories (Lillis and Curry 2010), genre chains (Fairclough 2003 [1995]), genre suites (Berkenkotter and Hanganu-Bresch 2011), genre sets (Devitt 2004), text chains (Fraenkel 2001; Linell 1998) and meaning-making trajectories (Kell 2009), all of which are used to empirically track and theorize the ways in which texts instantiate and

Writing in professional social work practice in a changing communicative landscape (WISP)

Professor Theresa Lillis, Maria Leedham and Alison Twiner are carrying out the first national project on writing and recording in social work: WiSP - Writing in professional social work practice in a changing communicative landscape. Alongside the project advisory panel, chaired by Lucy Gray, they are working to ensure findings can be used for informing education and training, as well as professional and institutional policy making.

BAAL/CUP Seminars 2013 / Text Trajectories Developing dynamic approaches to textual analysis

This seminar took place on 19 April, 2013 at the Centre for Language and Communication, Faculty of Language and Education Studies, The Open University. The seminar was coordinated by Janet Maybin and Theresa Lillis and there were 28 participants, including four postgraduate students, from universities in Britain, Belgium and South Africa.