My current research interests are in the field of academic ELF and ERPP. I have published on topics related to L2 scholars' research writing practices (JERPP, 2020) and teaching academic skills at the tertiary level.
In the last decade numerous studies have been published in the field of English as an academic li... more In the last decade numerous studies have been published in the field of English as an academic lingua franca (academic ELF). The majority of them, however, are devoted to the speaking mode. The present paper investigates written academic ELF texts – research articles in the social sciences and humanities. It explores the ways in which L2 speakers express epistemic stance in their texts and analyzes ELF-specific non-conventional forms of epistemic stance expressions. I use data from the SciELF corpus (https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/english-as-a-lingua-franca-in-academic-settings/research/wrelfa-corpus/scielf-corpus), which is unique in that it allows the study of academic texts written by L2 speakers in their unedited form. To uncover whether non-conventional expressions are also used in published academic texts, and to gain a deeper understanding of the extent to which variability in language use is accepted in published texts, I use the Google Scholar database as a refe...
University Writing in Central and Eastern Europe: Tradition, Transition, and Innovation, 2018
Competence in academic writing among university undergraduates has been a key area of research fo... more Competence in academic writing among university undergraduates has been a key area of research for over the last 30 years. However, the dominant status of English as the lingua franca of the global academic community has led to substantial changes in the academic language landscape of non-Anglophone countries. In particular, local traditions and practices of L1 academic writing within a university context tend to be under-supported while L2 (English) academic writing experience is treated as a top teaching priority.
This paper reports on the study of multilingual speakers’ perception of their research writing pr... more This paper reports on the study of multilingual speakers’ perception of their research writing practices in English and in their local language—Russian—and the publication process in English. It is based on interviews with 18 scholars from social sciences and humanities working in a leading university in Russia. The study discusses social factors influencing multilingual scholars’ choice of languages as well as their personal motivation to choose English as the main language of publication. Special attention is given to their attitude to proofreading as part of the publication process. The interview results suggest that, from the participants’ perspective, the benefits they gain by publishing research in English seem to outweigh costs they experience in the process of writing and publishing. The study contributes to the on-going debate about the position of multilingual scholars in the competition to publish in top-rated journals, suggesting that the traditional doctrine of linguist...
Due to internationalization of education, students in the majority of leading Russian universitie... more Due to internationalization of education, students in the majority of leading Russian universities are increasingly likely to use English as a medium of instruction. At the same time, they are not offered preparatory courses in English academic writing. As a result, students are able to develop their academic writing skills mainly while undertaking content-based courses. Recent research indicates that one of the major concerns for novice writers is to be able to express their stance. The key aim of the study is to show that implementing some methods of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) into a content-based course might improve students’ ability to take a stance in their writing. The paper presents the analysis of 45 essays written in English by L2 novice writers during a teleconference course taught to a group of Russian and American students. The study employs a comparative linguistic analysis of some stance markers (pronoun ‘I’, reporting verbs, epistemic modal and evidential ex...
Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes, 2020
In contemporary academia, multilingual scholars using English as an additional language (EAL) are... more In contemporary academia, multilingual scholars using English as an additional language (EAL) are actively engaged in knowledge construction producing more research texts in English than native speakers (Hyland, 2016). Having a more general purpose to gain insights into the factors that influence multilingual scholars’ research writing practices in English, this case study seeks to explore how EAL users perceive disciplinary norms of epistemic stance expression in political science. It is based on interviews with 5 Russian political scientists and on the analysis of their research texts. The findings suggest that the participants do not seem to have a shared understanding of disciplinary norms regarding epistemic stance expression; however, their narratives highlight the importance of the methodological paradigm the texts belong to for their writing practices. The study is a contribution to the discussion of the role of the discipline in EAL scholars’ research writing practices and linguistic and rhetorical variability of research texts within one discipline. The results of this study have pedagogical implications for ERPP course designers and practitioners.
Competence in academic writing among university undergraduates has been a key area of research fo... more Competence in academic writing among university undergraduates has been a key area of research for over the last 30 years. However, the dominant status of English as the lingua franca of the global academic community has led to substantial changes in the academic language landscape of non-Anglophone countries. In particular, local traditions and practices of L1 academic writing within a university context tend to be under-supported while L2 (English) academic writing experience is treated as a top teaching priority. The present study, carried out with the help of the LIDHUM project team, reports results on the current role of academic writing in L1 vs. L2 in Russia. A questionnaire was developed for first-and third-year undergraduates of a leading national research university to answer such questions as: whether academic writing plays an important role in the university, whether L1 writing is supported, which L1 and L2 written genres students use, how much time students spend on classroom-based vs. home-based writing, whether written tasks require critical thinking competence, whether academic writing is supported, and how writing skills are developed. The chapter focuses on L1/L2 similarities and differences as well as on first-year undergraduates' (i.e., entry-level) writing competence vs. third-year students' perceptions of writing skills. The study likewise reflects on developmental needs, which are also relevant for the European context.
Nowadays, when English has firmly established itself as a lingua franca (ELF) in academic setting... more Nowadays, when English has firmly established itself as a lingua franca (ELF) in academic settings, it is very important to study the features of texts written by L2 speakers who come from a variety of cultural and L1 backgrounds and who use ELF in their academic communication. The present study focuses on clusters of epistemic stance expressions used in research articles in social sciences and humanities written by L2 speakers. The analysis of twenty papers from the SciELF corpus reveals the patterns in the use of epistemic stance clusters, their distribution in different sections of research articles and the functions the clusters perform at the textual level. The results show that there are many similarities in the distribution and functions of epistemic stance clusters in texts. This suggests that the way L2 speakers, who are professionals in their fields, express epistemic stance seems to be more influenced by the norms of the genre and the discipline than by their linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
In the last decade numerous studies have been published in the field of English as an academic li... more In the last decade numerous studies have been published in the field of English as an academic lingua franca (academic ELF). The majority of them, however, are devoted to the speaking mode. The present paper investigates written academic ELF texts – research articles in the social sciences and humanities. It explores the ways in which L2 speakers express epistemic stance in their texts and analyzes ELF-specific non-conventional forms of epistemic stance expressions. I use data from the SciELF corpus (https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/english-as-a-lingua-franca-in-academic-settings/research/wrelfa-corpus/scielf-corpus), which is unique in that it allows the study of academic texts written by L2 speakers in their unedited form. To uncover whether non-conventional expressions are also used in published academic texts, and to gain a deeper understanding of the extent to which variability in language use is accepted in published texts, I use the Google Scholar database as a refe...
University Writing in Central and Eastern Europe: Tradition, Transition, and Innovation, 2018
Competence in academic writing among university undergraduates has been a key area of research fo... more Competence in academic writing among university undergraduates has been a key area of research for over the last 30 years. However, the dominant status of English as the lingua franca of the global academic community has led to substantial changes in the academic language landscape of non-Anglophone countries. In particular, local traditions and practices of L1 academic writing within a university context tend to be under-supported while L2 (English) academic writing experience is treated as a top teaching priority.
This paper reports on the study of multilingual speakers’ perception of their research writing pr... more This paper reports on the study of multilingual speakers’ perception of their research writing practices in English and in their local language—Russian—and the publication process in English. It is based on interviews with 18 scholars from social sciences and humanities working in a leading university in Russia. The study discusses social factors influencing multilingual scholars’ choice of languages as well as their personal motivation to choose English as the main language of publication. Special attention is given to their attitude to proofreading as part of the publication process. The interview results suggest that, from the participants’ perspective, the benefits they gain by publishing research in English seem to outweigh costs they experience in the process of writing and publishing. The study contributes to the on-going debate about the position of multilingual scholars in the competition to publish in top-rated journals, suggesting that the traditional doctrine of linguist...
Due to internationalization of education, students in the majority of leading Russian universitie... more Due to internationalization of education, students in the majority of leading Russian universities are increasingly likely to use English as a medium of instruction. At the same time, they are not offered preparatory courses in English academic writing. As a result, students are able to develop their academic writing skills mainly while undertaking content-based courses. Recent research indicates that one of the major concerns for novice writers is to be able to express their stance. The key aim of the study is to show that implementing some methods of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) into a content-based course might improve students’ ability to take a stance in their writing. The paper presents the analysis of 45 essays written in English by L2 novice writers during a teleconference course taught to a group of Russian and American students. The study employs a comparative linguistic analysis of some stance markers (pronoun ‘I’, reporting verbs, epistemic modal and evidential ex...
Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes, 2020
In contemporary academia, multilingual scholars using English as an additional language (EAL) are... more In contemporary academia, multilingual scholars using English as an additional language (EAL) are actively engaged in knowledge construction producing more research texts in English than native speakers (Hyland, 2016). Having a more general purpose to gain insights into the factors that influence multilingual scholars’ research writing practices in English, this case study seeks to explore how EAL users perceive disciplinary norms of epistemic stance expression in political science. It is based on interviews with 5 Russian political scientists and on the analysis of their research texts. The findings suggest that the participants do not seem to have a shared understanding of disciplinary norms regarding epistemic stance expression; however, their narratives highlight the importance of the methodological paradigm the texts belong to for their writing practices. The study is a contribution to the discussion of the role of the discipline in EAL scholars’ research writing practices and linguistic and rhetorical variability of research texts within one discipline. The results of this study have pedagogical implications for ERPP course designers and practitioners.
Competence in academic writing among university undergraduates has been a key area of research fo... more Competence in academic writing among university undergraduates has been a key area of research for over the last 30 years. However, the dominant status of English as the lingua franca of the global academic community has led to substantial changes in the academic language landscape of non-Anglophone countries. In particular, local traditions and practices of L1 academic writing within a university context tend to be under-supported while L2 (English) academic writing experience is treated as a top teaching priority. The present study, carried out with the help of the LIDHUM project team, reports results on the current role of academic writing in L1 vs. L2 in Russia. A questionnaire was developed for first-and third-year undergraduates of a leading national research university to answer such questions as: whether academic writing plays an important role in the university, whether L1 writing is supported, which L1 and L2 written genres students use, how much time students spend on classroom-based vs. home-based writing, whether written tasks require critical thinking competence, whether academic writing is supported, and how writing skills are developed. The chapter focuses on L1/L2 similarities and differences as well as on first-year undergraduates' (i.e., entry-level) writing competence vs. third-year students' perceptions of writing skills. The study likewise reflects on developmental needs, which are also relevant for the European context.
Nowadays, when English has firmly established itself as a lingua franca (ELF) in academic setting... more Nowadays, when English has firmly established itself as a lingua franca (ELF) in academic settings, it is very important to study the features of texts written by L2 speakers who come from a variety of cultural and L1 backgrounds and who use ELF in their academic communication. The present study focuses on clusters of epistemic stance expressions used in research articles in social sciences and humanities written by L2 speakers. The analysis of twenty papers from the SciELF corpus reveals the patterns in the use of epistemic stance clusters, their distribution in different sections of research articles and the functions the clusters perform at the textual level. The results show that there are many similarities in the distribution and functions of epistemic stance clusters in texts. This suggests that the way L2 speakers, who are professionals in their fields, express epistemic stance seems to be more influenced by the norms of the genre and the discipline than by their linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
Uploads
Papers by Irina Shchemeleva