Bilingual Scholars' Academic Literacies Practices in Dual Discourse Communities

This study explores the challenges and strategies for an increasing number of bilingual scholars who are making great efforts to build and maintain their bilingual academic literacies. Bilingual academic literacies are... [ view full abstract ]

This study explores the challenges and strategies for an increasing number of bilingual scholars who are making great efforts to build and maintain their bilingual academic literacies. Bilingual academic literacies are constructed and developed over a long course of practices within a bilingual discourse community where scholars have to constantly balance and negotiate their literacy knowledge in the first language (L1) and the second language (L2). Situated in the theoretical framework of academic literacies research and community of practices, the study investigates the writing and publishing experiences of five bilingual Chinese-English scholars who are keen to publish in both Chinese-medium and English-medium journals. Participants were native Chinese speakers holding faculty positions in top Chinese universities, who received doctoral education in English-speaking countries. In order to obtain a holistic view, this study used a narrative approach to examine their bilingual academic literacies practices. Following a series of interviews and observations, the study has identified a few sets of factors at social, institutional and personal levels that could have determined bilingual scholars’ linguistic choices as well as their strategies to develop writing and publishing practices. The study found that bilingual scholars frequently assess and adjust strategies, focuses and interests depending on the communities for which they write. The study also found that it is usually the L1 academic writing skill that remains mysterious and challenging as it has never been explicitly taught throughout their education in China, which deserves more research attention.

In this presentation, I will firstly sketch out participants’ everyday language choices in scholarly writing and publishing, and secondly elaborate a few key factors that have influenced their language choices. Following this, I will briefly compare one or two writing samples offered by participants for audience to understand their perceived differences between academic writing conventions in English and Chinese. At the end of the presentation, I will give some suggestions to bilingual scholars for further developing their bilingual academic literacies.