Abstract
This paper reports on a qualitative inquiry into Chinese multilingual scholars’ language practices in academic publishing as the Chinese government develops higher education competitiveness and expands multilingual foreign language education. Fifteen Chinese multilingual scholars from five non-English language divisions were interviewed. Bourdieu’s linguistic market theory was adopted as the guiding framework to understand the scholars’ multilingual practices in academic publishing. The findings suggest that institutional research assessment based on key index lists functioned as a market unification mechanism that devalued the scholars’ multilingual capital. Meanwhile, the implicit language policy of publishing in and about English perpetuated and reproduced structural inequality in the international and national academic publishing marketplace. Despite this perceived disadvantaged position, the scholars generated new language practices to counteract the structural constraints. In light of these findings, policy makers should be aware of the implicit language policies in index-based research assessment exercises, and should take into consideration the specific circumstances of different language majors when developing research assessment policies. Measures are suggested to empower multilingual scholars with capacities to participate equally in knowledge construction, regardless of the languages that they work with.
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14 September 2019
Multilingualism and policy making in Greater China: ideological and implementational spaces
Notes
The Chinese version of the 2011 ‘Decision’ can be found online at http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2011-10/25/content_1978202.htm.
The Chinese version of the overall plan is available online at http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2015-11/05/content_10269.htm.
The CSCI as a counterpart of the SCI was devised by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the early 1990s, and the CSSCI as a counterpart of the SSCI was developed by Nanjing University in 2000.
Ruiz (1984) proposed the metaphor of language-as-problem orientation in language policy mainly to initiate a counter-narrative to the dominant deficit perspective of minority languages in the US (Ruiz 2010: 166). We found the construct compatible in capturing multilingual scholars’ challenges in academic publishing.
The full English text of the strategic plan can be retrieved from http://english.gov.cn/archive/publications/2015/03/30/content_281475080249035.htm.
The full text of the document is available at http://www.moe.edu.cn/srcsite/A20/s7068/201608/t20160811_274679.html.
The document is available online at http://www.moe.edu.cn/srcsite/A08/moe_1034/s4930/201703/t20170317_299960.html.
We acknowledge that it is rather simplistic to attribute the difficulty of publishing non-English studies in domestic journals on foreign language studies solely to impact factor. There may well be other reasons to explain the low visibility of non-English studies, such as the relatively lower research quality compared with the more advanced theoretical frameworks and methodologies usually adopted in English studies. However, we attempted to explore the participants’ explanation of the issue and to reveal their subjective responses to the challenges they encountered in order to better examine the generative language practices.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the participants for sharing with us their stories. We would also like to thank Prof. Diane Belcher for her suggestions during the initial conception of this project. This study was partially supported by the Shanghai Philosophy and Social Sciences Fund (2017BYY008).
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Zheng, Y., Guo, X. Publishing in and about English: challenges and opportunities of Chinese multilingual scholars’ language practices in academic publishing. Lang Policy 18, 107–130 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-018-9464-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-018-9464-8