Fostering a Collaborative Interdisciplinary Publication Skills Education (CIPSE) approach at a Chinese university

Abstract

A recommended approach for developing high quality discipline-specific writing skills in HDR students and earlycareer researchers involves effective collaboration between language professionals and discipline experts. Nevertheless, it is recognised that such collaborative partnerships have not become commonplace, and that specialists in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) typically have a hard time persuading discipline experts to develop a sustainable interest in such a collaborative relationship. In this paper, we analyse and reflect upon an attempt to do so by one of us, Margaret, a veteran external EAP professional from Australia who has been committed to teaching international publication skills to Chinese scientists over the past 15 years. Her (largely unrealized) aim in a school of sciences at a prestigious Chinese university was to foster a Collaborative Interdisciplinary Publication Skills Education (CIPSE) (Cargill & O’Connor, 2010) approach. The dataset that forms the basis of our study comes from several sources: the PowerPoint slides used by Margaret in talking to supervisors in the school on two occasions, the audio-recording of the second meeting, which included views from two academics who could express themselves in English, group discussions of a class of research students attending a summer course taught by Margaret in the school, and interviews with Margaret conducted by Yongyan. We argue that supervisors’ reluctance to commit themselves to collaborating in the nurture of their students’ English writing expertise has understandable and regrettable consequences. We further propose ways for local EAP teachers (an emerging population in the Chinese context) to adapt and develop the CIPSE approach in their own institutional contexts. Reference: Cargill, M., & O’Connor, P. (2010). Structuring interdisciplinary collaboration to develop research students’ skills for publishing research internationally: Lessons from implementation. In M. Davies, M. Devlin, & M. Tight (Eds.), Interdisciplinary higher education: Perspectives and practicalities (pp. 279-292). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.