Week 1: Globalization of Scholarships: Studying Chinese Scholars Writing for International Publication.

Key points: In this text the reader is lead through the process of conducting a long-term research project that looks at ESL writing. The research project looks at Chinese university students who are faced with writing in English as a side effect of globalization.

Globalization, for good or for bad, is forcing English upon international university students seeking to publish in academic journals. For many reasons students writing for publication must use the international lingua franca, English. For international students this means using English as an additional language, which in this text is referred to as EAL.

The study takes place in two locations, each of which provide unique insight into the effects of globalization because of their unique circumstances. Hong Kong was under English rule at the time of this study and is the first location in this study. Mainland China is the second location and is special because it is new to the international scene.

The study took place because of the upcoming hand over of Hong Kong back to China. This meant native English speaking professors were about to be replaced by Chinese speaking professors thereby making EAL an issue in Hong Kong universities. The researchers behind this study wanted to look at the way Chinese speaking scholars were writing for English publications. There were four main objectives for the study:

1. To investigate attitudes toward writing in EAL.
2. To look at problems specific to each field of study.
3. To look at interactions between the writers and the international community involved in research journals.
4. To see the effects EAL has on the content of their writing.

The text then proceeds to detail the methods used to conduct the research.

Finally, after learning about the steps that went into the project the reader learns the results of the project. The findings were:

1. Writing in EAL takes a great amount of effort.
2. Their papers are affected by their L1.
3. Each field has it own way of writing in EAL.
4. And, the point I found most interesting, Chinese students had a cynical attitude toward the gatekeepers of the academic journals.

My interaction with the article: This was my first time to read about researching in ESL. In the past, I used tests to do my own informal research. I didn't learn anything from the tests and now I'm beginning to understand why. I think all are curios as to what teaching methods work in their classroom and what methods do not. I'm curious about my classmate's experience with informal research in their classrooms.

I have many questions about the research project that weren't answered in the text.

1. Did the researchers speak Chinese and English?
2. How do language barriers affect research projects such as this?
3. Who are the people who do these types research projects? How do they make a living? What else do they do to make a living while they are conducting research? Doesn't the background information affect the results of the research?
4. The results and details of the survey must be really tedious to read and to check. Who job is it to do this? Do they ask the same background questions about the researchers personal details that I just did?

The most interesting part of the article was the end when we got to read the results of the research. One of the findings was that the Chinese authors of the academic papers were cynical toward the gatekeepers for the academic journals. I am wondering if it was the purpose of this research to bring this issue to their attention. It seems to me to be an important issue in globalization. Is this a well known problem? Is there anything being done counteract the bias against non-English speaking countries in a globalized world that choose English as its lingua fraca?