We have become protectors of English: revisiting policies of publishing in English in non-Anglophone academia

ABSTRACT

In the vigorous trend of international publication as a crucial research performance indicator, English claims the status of the uncontested global language of academic publishing. In this study, after providing a sketch of the policies of writing and publishing in English in Iran (reflected in national policy documents and university bylaws), we probe the perspectives of nine Iranian higher education policy experts about these policies through semi-structured interviews. The findings reveal that while policy documents indicate strong orientations in favor of publishing in English, the main justifications behind these policies appear to be vague ideas of demonstrating local academic capabilities and winning international reputation. However, the participants admit that ignoring the peculiarities of different academic fields and neglecting real-life research concerns while overemphasizing the number of research products are the main pitfalls of the policies. Their view of these problems and their suggested solutions indicate little consideration of the concern over the dominance of English in the world today. We discuss some aspects of this concern in relation to the neocolonial status of English in non-Anglophone countries where other languages and cultures can be overshadowed by a dominant so-called global academic lingua franca.

KEYWORDS:

• Publishing in English
• dominance of English
• academic writing
• academic publishing
• higher education policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini

Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini is an Associate Professor at The University of Hong Kong. His research areas include the sociopolitics of language education, and qualitative research. His writing has appeared in journals including Applied Linguistics; Critical Inquiry in Language Studies; and TESOL Quarterly. His most recent book is Doing Qualitative Research in Language Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Farnoosh Rashed

Farnoosh Rashed received her PhD in TEFL from Alzahra University, Iran. Her research focuses on sociocultural aspects of English teaching, higher education policies, and academic writing and publishing. She has presented at different conferences and has published in Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education; System; and Sociolinguistic Studies.

Mohsen Shirazizadeh

Mohsen Shirazizadeh is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Alzahra University, Iran. His areas of research include academic and second language writing and corpus linguistics. His most recent publications have appeared in Journal of English for Academic purposes and Journal of Language, Identity and Education.