ABSTRACT
English has increasingly become the language for science and technology publishing, squeezing out other national languages even in their home countries (Pennycook, 1994b; Phillipson, 1992; Phillipson & SkutnabbKangas, 2000; Swales, 1997) and forcing researchers with little or no interest in English itself to learn to write in English or to take on collaborators that do. Many discussions of L2 writers publishing in English begin with reference to this dominance of English in international publications (Canagarajah, 1996, 2002b; Gosden, 1992; Parkhurst, 1990; St. John, 1987; Swales, 1997), referring to the “English monoculture in the scholarly community” (Duszak, 1997b, p. 3) and to English as the Tyrannosaurus rex of languages (Swales, 1997). As J. Flowerdew (1999a) points out, international databases such as the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index primarily list English-language journals, libraries subscribe to journals in such databases, scholars consult journals in libraries, articles published in these journals get more citations and attention and so attract more scholars to try to publish in them, and as a result of this whole inexorable process (St. John, 1987), “the ascendancy of English is self-perpetuating” (Gibbs, 1995, in Scientific American cited in J. Flowerdew, 1999a, p. 243). In some non-English-dominant countries hiring, promotion, tenure, and even conferral of PhD degrees requires publishing in international journals, which in many instances means in English (Braine, 2005; Casanave, 1998; Curry & Lillis, 2004; J. Flowerdew, 2000; Gosden, 1992, 1996). Curry and Lillis (2004) reported, for example, that in Slovakia, where academic professional activities are rated on a point system for purposes of raises and promotions, a publication in an English-medium journal merits twice the number of points as one in a Slovak-medium journal. In other cases scholars publish in English in order to add their voices and home country’s perspectives to the international conversation in their professions (Casanave, 2002), noting, as one scholar put it, that publishing in English is necessary because “you never get cited when you write in [the scholar’s L1]” (Curry & Lillis, 2004, p. 679).
