Following Lillis and Curry (2010), this multiple case study aims to shed light into telling publication practices in English. Target participants were Turkish medical specialists, post-graduate medical students and undergraduate medical students (n=6). Text-oriented ethnography methodology provided me with rich ethnographic and text data to investigate the production of texts.
Following Lillis and Curry (2010), in a non-Anglophone ‘peripheral’ context, this multiple case study aims to shed light into telling publication practices in English. In this longitudinal research, target participants were Turkish medical specialists (n=2), post-graduate medical students (n=2) and also undergraduate medical students (n=2). I used text-oriented ethnography methodology because this methodology provided me with a range of rich ethnographic and text data sources to investigate the production of texts. I was able to track text production, practices, and experiences and also investigated the potential effects of the politics of location in academic text production (Lillis & Curry, 2010, pp. 4-5). To track academic text production, text histories were collected, including submissions, reviewers’/editors’/lecturers’ comments, resubmissions, and self-reflective journals were collected. The need for academic literacy brokering (Lillis & Curry, 2006) for guidance was the most salient theme. Thus, the involvement of various academic, language and non-professional support was apparent, such as translating, editing, proofreading, polishing, and reviewing, to produce an English-medium academic text. Also, the need for a literacy broker to prevent plagiarism was evident from participants’ accounts and practices given English language incompetency which seems to have an effect on the experience regarding paraphrasing sentences while citing. In addition to the discursive (language related) challenges, non-discursive (non-language related) challenges (Canagarajah, 1996) were striking particularly for undergraduate medical students due to the lack of research culture. References Canagarajah, S. (1996). Non-discursive Requirements in academic publishing, material resources of periphery scholars, and the politics of knowledge production. Written Communication,13(4), 435-472. Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2010). Academic writing in a global context-The politics and practices of publishing in English. London: Routledge. Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2006). Professional academic writing by multilingual scholars: Interactions with literacy brokers in the production of English-medium texts. Written Communication, 23(1), 3-35.
