Academic Writing in a Second or Foreign Language

Issues and Challenges Facing ESL/EFL Academic Writers in Higher Education Contexts

It can be a challenge writing in a language that is not your native tongue. Constructing academic essays, dissertations and research articles in this second or foreign language is even more challenging, yet across the globe thousands of academics and students do so, some out of choice, some out of necessity. This book looks at a major issue within the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). It focuses on the issues confronting non-native-English-speaking academics, scholars and students, who face increasing pressure to write and publish in English, now widely acknowledged as the academic lingua franca. Questions of identity, access, pedagogy and empowerment naturally arise. This book looks at both student and professional academic writers, using qualitative text analysis, quantitative questionnaire data, corpus investigations and ethnographic approaches to searchingly examine issues central to the EAP field.