Producing scholarly texts: Writing in English in a politically stigmatized country

With English increasingly acquiring the academic lingua franca (Flowerdew, 1999a , 1999b) status in the scholarly text production arena and the implication this will have for researchers in non-Anglophone countries to publish in Eng-lish, research on multilingual scholars writing in their L2 (English) has received considerable attention from academic writing researchers over the last couple of decades. These studies have addressed a range of issues related to scholarly writing in L2 and have contributed to our understanding of how personal, textual, and contextual factors foster or constrain text production in English. Leki, Cumming, and Silva (2008, p. 57) have summarized research studies on professional L2 writing in English over the last 25 years into the categories of text analysis, writing processes and strategies of novice and successful L2 authors, first person accounts by L2 scholarly authors writing in English, case studies of bilingual authors, and the variety of communities that these scholars envision as their audience. The contexts represented in the studies reported in Leki et al. (2008) include Spanish (St. John, 1987), Scandinavian (Jernudd & Baldauf, 1987), Hungarian (Medgyes & Kaplan, 1992), Hong Kong (Flowerdew, 1999a, 1999b, 2000), Danish (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000), Hungarian, Slovakian, Spanish, Portuguese (Curry & Lillis, 2004; Lillis & Curry, 2006, Lillis & Curry, 2010), Chinese (Liu, 2004), Japanese (Casanave, 1998; Okamura, 2006), Armenian (Sahakyan, 2006), Polish (Duszak & Lewkowicz, 2008), and Turkish (Buckingham, 2008). These studies are all from contexts and countries where no vivid and formally articulated political agony defines the political relation between English speaking countries and the countries in which the participants of studies were living and working. No sanctions are leveled against these countries, and scholars in these countries do not experience any restrictions accessing resources, networking with their colleagues in Anglophone countries, nor do they have any visa restrictions when travelling to Anglophone countries. Even when it comes to socio-political and ideological issues related to L2 text production mostly represented in the works of Canagarajah (1996, 2001, 2002, 2005), Pennycook (1997, 1999, 2001), and Benesch (1996, 2001), the peripheral participants or contexts studied are not politically in conlict with the Anglophone center.