English as a Scientific and Research Language. Debates and Discourses, Ramon Plo Alastrue and Carmen Perez-Llantada (Eds.). De Gruyter Mouton (2015)

English as a Scientific and Research Language. Debates and Discourses SYNERGY volume 12, no. 1/2016 292 ENGLISH AS A SCIENTIFIC AND RESEARCH LANGUAGE. DEBATES AND DISCOURSES. ENGLISH IN EUROPE, VOLUME 2 Ramón Plo Alastrué and Carmen Pérez-Llantada (eds.) 2015. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. ISBN 978-1-61451-749-8 (x + 366 pages) Oana Maria CARCIU1 The volume entitled English as a Scientific and Research Language. Debates and Discourses. English in Europe, Volume 2 is part of a book series published within the frame of the English in Europe: Opportunity or Threat? project funded by the Leverhulme Trust (research network site http://englishineurope.group.shef.ac.uk). As stated in the “Series Preface”, the overall aim of the project was that of “providing for the first time a properly informed and nuanced picture of the reality of living with and through the medium of English” (Linn, page v). This thread runs through the whole volume, with a particular focus on the similarities and divergences across European academic and research settings. In this volume, the contributions from countries such as Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Sweden were sought, in order to present a more complete picture of the several national contexts of the scholarly study of English as a lingua franca of science. Therefore, the present book brings in work that may be new to readers. Also, it is a rich and valuable research-informed resource of interest to scholars involved in the debate surrounding the effects of the dominance of English in research/scientific communication. The volume is nicely organized into three parts that focus on the following: Part I “The socio-cultural scenario”, Part II “The discourse community scenario” and Part III “The language policy scenario. English as a lingua franca in linguistics”. This structure clearly reflects that the topic is approached from the three-pronged perspective of socio-cultural context, discourse community and language policy and planning. In addition, as the “Introduction” announces, the studies provide quantitative and qualitative evidence on the matter at issue, which is interpreted from multidisciplinary theoretical positions. Having culture and rhetoric at its core, the chapters collected in Part I problematize the issue of cultural diversity and rhetorical features inherent to European academic discourses against the trend towards an English-medium academic culture. 1 Oana Maria Carciu, Centro Universitario de la Defensa-Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, [email protected] Book Reviews SYNERGY volume 12, no. 1/2016 293 The chapter by Bennett cautions against the “epistemicide” effects of English academic discourse (EAD) within the field of humanities. This phenomenon is tracked at the level of discourse and claimed to be “backed up by a series of nondiscursive mechanisms that reinforce the hegemony of EAD and, by extension, the empiricist paradigm, through ‘quality-control’ and, crucially, resource allocation procedures” (p. 9). Some of the socio-cultural consequences of non-discursive mechanisms such as the ‘publish or perish’ mantra, literacy brokering, impact factors and citation indexes, peer-reviewing and funding are explored, while addressing harsh criticism at the “uncritical espousal of the empirical paradigm” (p. 25) by the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) research and teaching market. Once again, Breeze looks at citation practices of scholars outside the AngloAmerican inner circle and thus contributes evidence on the epistemological monoculture problem uncovered by Bennett. This chapter is a particularly elegant example of mixed-methods research. First, it provides quantitative data on the number of citations to publications in languages other than English in the social sciences. The findings obtained, based on a sample of ten top international journals, are then triangulated by interviews conducted with authors and editors to uncover their citation strategies and concerns. With a focus on the social cooperative activities of academic writing and publishing (i.e. strategies, peers and techniques as resources for publishing in English), the chapter by Gnutzmann, Jakisch and Rabe aims to challenge the assumption that publication success is contingent on language competence only. In the last chapter in Part I, Bondi inquires into the interplay between genres and language choice by European agencies for scientific knowledge dissemination on the World Wide Web. Therefore, it seems difficult to escape the conclusion that English is the dominant language “even in websites of European agencies characterized by an explicit multilingual policy” (p. 108). The contributions in Part II draw our attention to specific discourse communities. The chapters present comparative findings as regards cross-cultural differences identified at text level to cast light on the linguistic challenges that L2 scholars face when publishing their research in English for an international audience. In the first chapter, Povolná explores the Czech discourse community and brings evidence of the adoption of the Anglo-American rhetoric style as regards the use of conjuncts as text-organizing devices in research articles. Oliver adopts a cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary perspective to analyse research papers, case reports and book reviews, and shows that hedging expressions and attitude markers are a challenge that Spanish scholars have to face when publishing in English in the field of medicine and linguistics. The chapter by Schmied presents a comparison of the graduate student community across different academic writing cultures and considers the findings of the study within the broader frame of internationalization and teaching (Non-Native) Standard European Academic English. Citation practices of Czech and Anglo-American academic discourse communities are compared in the chapter by Dontcheva-Navratilova to identify variation and the English as a Scientific and Research Language. Debates and Discourses SYNERGY volume 12, no. 1/2016 294 dominance of English on the Czech original literacy epistemology. The last chapter by Bocanegra-Valle shifts perspectives from writers to the discourse community of peer reviewers to report findings from the analysis of an occluded genre, peer review reports. The major thrust of this chapter is devoted to unpacking reviewers’ language-related comments and suggestions for better research writing since “language is a main concern in peer review reports” (p. 225). The author interestingly concludes that “no clear pattern has been found that identifies different typologies of language-related comments for Anglophone and nonAnglophone-authored submissions” (p. 228), although she acknowledges the need to consider further distinctions between novice and expert, or networked and offnetwork scholars. The thread that draws together the contributions in Part III is that of language policy and language planning. Aiming to gain insight into the factors that lead to the choice of the language to publish in, Schluer interviews German L1 linguists who reveal that institutional policies can be determinants of language choice. Kuteeva reports on Swedish academics’ research and publication practices in an academic setting in which parallel language policies have been developed in order to promote linguistic diversity. The chapter by Muresan and Nicolae nicely complements Kuteeva’s study by examining Romanian scholars’ perceptions and attitudes towards the challenges of the policy issues associated with publishing in English as a lingua franca. The novelty of this study is that it expands the field of inquiry to include not only the researchers, but also journal editors who evaluate manuscripts for publication; in addition, the authors offer suggestions for instructional intervention and pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning languages for academic and research purposes. Taking as a starting point the development and growth of English-medium programmes in the broader frame of internationalization, Margić and Žeželić survey Croatian students to determine their attitude towards the implementation of such programmes. Also of relevance to policy makers are the findings of Lewińska’s study as regards Polish students’ attitudes towards native and non-native teachers of English. Overall, the volume covers a wide range of topics. It provides an understanding of the most up-to-date evidence-based insights on how the use of English for academic communication may lead to opportunities or threats with which European higher education systems have to get to grips. As can be seen from the final chapter (Pérez-Llantada) setting out key themes for future research, “it appears that the conceptualization of English as an international language is gradually moving beyond the traditional analytical binaries” (p. 353), that is, Anglophone/nonAnglophone, inner/outer, central/(semi)-peripheral; in addition, academic and research settings are international and multilingual, a reality which requires a research approach that views English within the complex ecosystem of languages that characterizes the “increasingly interconnected multilingual and multicultural world” (p. 353) and calls into question the concept of linguistic imperialism. Book Reviews SYNERGY volume 12, no. 1/2016 295 The Author of the Book Review Oana Maria Carciu is a lecturer in English for Specific Purposes at the Defense University of Zaragoza. Her research focuses on the application of mixed-methods to document discourse patterns in English-medium academic communication. She is also an editorial assistant for Ibérica, the Journal of the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes AELFE (http://www.aelfe.org/?s=presentacio).