A Proposal for Critical-Pragmatic Pedagogical Approaches to English for Research Publication Purposes

Despite the increasing demands on many multilingual scholars outside the centre(s) of scientific knowledge production to publish their research in international scholarly journals, the support for such academic writing for publication is uneven at best. Existing English for research publication purposes (ERPP) instruction typically aims to aid multilingual scholars in achieving genre-based expectations and/or navigating the submission and review process, but it often does not address the politics of English-language knowledge production. In this paper, informed by an empirical case study and a theory building perspective, we address the need for a sustained program of courses/workshops for multilingual scholars in the (semi-) periphery and propose a means of operationalizing a critical-pragmatic approach to such course/workshop content. Our empirically-driven model is informed by the results of a recent case study investigation into an intensive ERPP intervention designed to address multilingual Spanish-speaking L1 scholars’ challenges with writing research articles for publication in indexed (Web of Science) international scientific journals. Our model lays the groundwork for a more critical approach to ERPP pedagogy, one that attempts to attend more fully to the needs of multilingual scholars within an asymmetrical market of global knowledge production.