Content specialists teaching writing for publication: A review of pedagogical practices

Abstract

<p>Across the globe language specialists in many universities are increasingly getting involved in offering advanced academic literacy instruction, or specifically, writing for publication courses or workshops, to doctoral students and early-career academics. Currently, the most important pedagogical tools for these English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) practitioners are perhaps the Swalesian genre-based approaches, augmented by corpus methods that capitalize on the learning potential afforded by corpora. The field of ERPP, however, seems to have largely overlooked the fact that writing for publication (WfP) instruction is also being undertaken by content specialists to their own students. The scenario of separate lifeworlds famously depicted in the context of discussing language-content partnership in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English-as-the-medium-of-instruction (EMI) enterprises also applies here, where language and content lecturers follow separate pathways in building novices’ capacities to publish in international refereed journals. There is a need for language specialists to look beyond their discipline of applied linguistics and find out what content specialists are doing in terms of cultivating publishing skills and vice versa. To start to address the need, this article surveys disciplinary specialists’ pedagogical practices in WfP instruction targeting graduate-level students or early-career academics. Relevant academic literature dated from the early 2000s to the early 2020s, in the size of about 60 reports published in education journals and other specialist journals of disciplines, was gathered through a combination of systematic searching, snow-balling, and incidental discovery. Inductive content analysis led to a cluster of thematic strands which are reported and illustrated in the paper. The scoping review provides a valuable reference to the field of ERPP by offering insights into the pedagogical principles, designs, tactics, and responses to challenges that have been skilfully employed by content specialists in boosting publishing success in a great variety of institutional contexts.</p>