Abstract
This chapter examines the challenges of grant writing faced by new non-Anglophone academics who have taken positions in English North American universities. Drawing on a case study, which includes a discourse analysis of proposal drafts and interviews with a new non-Anglophone scientist, the chapter illustrates how the academic practice of grant writing in the “fiercely competitive” Anglophone academia (Hyland 2007) may be challenging for non-Anglophone scholars to master. The chapter explains how discursive practices of different national academic systems shape and require different scholarly identities. The chapter concludes by providing possible ways in which new non-Anglophone academics can be assisted in understanding the genre system of the grant proposal.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Happily, at the time of writing Grigory had already been tenured (LY).
- 2.
James Fallows in his January/February 2010 article in The Atlantic quotes a Nobel Prize winner and the President of the U.S. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Harold Varmus: “My favourite statistic is that one-quarter of the members of the National Academy of Sciences were born abroad. We may not be so good on the pipeline of producing new scientists, but the country is still a very effective magnet” (p. 46). Figures for The Royal Society of Canada are even higher: well over a third of its fellows are foreign-born, and a quarter of all fellows are non-Anglophone (RSC Communications Office April 2010).
- 3.
This is an allusion. Five-year economic plans became history in 1991, with the break-up of the USSR. But since a North American reader is still likely to associate the concept with centralized government intervention in the former Soviet countries, its draw was irresistible.
References
Bazerman, C., & Prior, P. (2005). Participating in emergent socio-literate worlds: Genre, disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity. [Electronic Version]. http://www.education.ucsb.edu/bazerman/chapters/chapters1.html#2005. Accessed March 2007.
Becher, T., & Trowler, P. (2001). Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines. Milton Keyes: The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.
Belcher, D. (2007). Seeking acceptance in an English-only research world. Journal of Second Language Writing, 16(1), 1–22.
Blakeslee, A. (2001). Interacting with audiences: Social influences on the production of scientific writing. Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Canagarajah, S. (2002). A geopolitics of academic writing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Chapin, P. G. (2004). Research projects and research proposals: A guide for scientists seeking funding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Čmejrková, S., & Daneš, F. (1997). Academic writing and cultural identity: The case of Czech academic writing. In A. Duszak (Ed.), Culture and styles of academic discourse (pp. 1–28). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Connor, U. (2000). Variation in rhetorical moves in grant proposals of U.S. humanists and scientists. Text, 20, 1–28.
Connor, U., & Mauranen, A. (1999). Linguistic analysis of grant proposals: European Union research grants. English for Specific Purposes, 18, 47–62.
Dezhina, I., & Graham, L. R. (2005). Science foundations: A novelty in Russian science. Science Magazine, 310(5755), 1772–1773.
Ding, H. (2008). The use of cognitive and social apprenticeship to teach a disciplinary genre: Initiation of graduate students into NIH grant writing. Written Communication, 25, 3–52.
Fallows, J. (2010, January–February). How America can rise again. The Atlantic, 2010(January–February), 38–55.
Fedotov, G. P. (1991). The destiny and sins of Russia: Selected articles on the philosophy of Russian history and culture [Sud’ba i griekhi Rossii: izbrannye stat’i po filosofii russkoĭ istorii i kul’tury]. Sankt-Petersburg: Izdatelstvo Sofia.
Feng, H. (2008). A genre-based study of research grant proposals in China. In U. Connor, E. Nagelhout, & W. Rozycki, (Eds.), Contrastive rhetoric: Reaching to intercultural rhetoric (pp. 63–86). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Flowerdew, J. (2001). Attitudes of journal editors to non-native contributions. TESOL Quarterly, 35, 121–150.
Flowerdew, J. (2007). The non-Anglophone scholar at the periphery of scientific communication. AILA Review, 20, 14–27.
Freedman, A., & Medway, P. (Eds.). (1994a). Genre and the new rhetoric. London: Taylor & Francis.
Freedman, A., & Medway, P. (1994b). Introduction: New views of genre and their implications for education. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Learning and teaching genre (pp. 1–24). Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook.
Gerber, T. P., & Yarsike Ball, D. (2009). Scientists in a changed institutional environment: Subjective adaptation and social responsibility norms in Russia. Social Studies of Science, 39, 529–567.
Gould, E. (2003). The university in a corporate culture. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Heppner, F. (2009). On the bottom line, good teaching tops good research. The Chronicle of Higher Education [Electronic version]. http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/journal/chron-aug09.pdf. Accessed January 2010.
Hyland, K. (2004). Disciplinary discourses: Social interactions in academic writing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Hyland, K. (2005). Metadiscourse. London: Continuum.
Hyland, K. (2007). Writing in the academy—reputation, education and knowledge. Institute of Education, University of London. http://www.ioe.ac.uk/publications. [Electronic version]. http://ctl.stanford.edu/Tomprof/postings.html. Accessed February 2008.
Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2005). Hooking the reader: A corpus study of evaluative that in abstracts. English for Specific Purposes, 24, 123–139.
Irvine, J., Martin, B. R., & Isard, P. (1990). Investing in the future: An international comparison of government funding of academic and related research. Hants: Edward Elgar.
Kourilova, M. (1998). Communicative characteristics of reviews of scientific papers written by non-native speakers of English. Endocrine Regulations, 37, 107–114.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marvasti, A. (2005). U.S. academic institutions and perceived effectiveness of foreign-born faculty. Journal of Economic Issues, 39(1), 151–176.
Mauranen, A. (1993). Cultural differences in academic rhetoric: A text-linguistic study. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
McDaniel, T. (1998). The agony of the Russian idea. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mehlenbacher, B. (1992). Rhetorical moves in scientific proposal writing: A case study from biochemical engineering. Unpublished Dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.
Mehlenbacher, B. (1994). The Rhetorical nature of academic research funding. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 37(3), 157–162.
Mikelonis, V., Betsinger, S., & Kampf, C. (2004). Grant seeking in an electronic age. New York: Pearson Longman.
Mukerji, C. (1989). A fragile power: Scientists and the state. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Myers, G. (1990). Writing biology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Nicholson, P., Davies, G., & Kaspi, V. (2008). Report of the International Review Committee on the Discovery Grants Program. Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Olsen, K. L., & Tornow, J. (2007). Impact of proposal and award management mechanisms: Final report to the National Science Board. http://www.nsf.gov/od/ipamm/ipamm.jsp. Accessed November 2009.
Petrić, B. (2005). Contrastive rhetoric in the writing classroom: A case study. English for Specific Purposes, 24(2), 213–228.
Pisanski-Peterlin, A. (2005). Text-organising metatext in research articles: An English–Slovene contrastive analysis. English for Specific Purposes, 24(3), 307–319.
Russia: The National Research Funding System. (2004). Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG—German Research Foundation).
Salager-Meyer, F. (2008). Scientific publishing in developing countries: Challenges for the future. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 7, 121–132.
Schryer, C., Chen, J., DeHaan, C., Devitt, R., Fuchs, J., Rogers, E., et al. (2004). Strategies in use in successful SSHRC applications (http://www.research.uwaterloo.ca/grants/grantsmanship.html). University of Waterloo: Office of Research.
Skachkova, P. (2007). Academic careers of immigrant women professors in the U.S. Higher Education, 53, 697–738.
Statistics Canada. (2006). Census: Canada, Provinces, Territories, Census Metropolitan Areas and Census Agglomerations. University professors (E111).
Sullivan, D. L. (1996). Displaying disciplinarity. Written Communication, 13(2), 221–250.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tardy, C. (2003). A genre system view of the funding of academic research. Written Communication, 20(1), 7–36.
The Economist. (2010, January 23). Spending on education: Investing in brains. Print edition, 394(8666), 57–58.
U.S. General Accounting Office (2003). University research: Most federal agencies need to better protect against financial conflicts of interest. Report to the Honorable Richard C. Shelby, U.S. Senate. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0431.pdf. Accessed January 2010.
Writing in the Disciplines (2010). The postdoctoral fellowships in scientific writing. Call for applications. Princeton University. http://web.princeton.edu/sites/writing/wse/postdoc/WDWSEPostdocContent.htm. Accessed February 2010.
Yakhontova, T. (2002). ‘Selling’ or ‘telling’? The issue of intercultural variation in research genres. In J. Flowerdew (Ed.), Academic discourse (pp. 216–232). Harlow: Longman.
Further Reading
Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analysing genre: Language use in professional settings. London: Longman.
Bizzell, P. (1982). Cognition, convention, certainty: What we need to know about writing. Reprinted in V. Villanueva (Ed.) (2003), Cross-talk in comp theory: A reader. Urbana: NCTE.
Canagarajah, S. (2003). Somewhat legitimate and very peripheral participation. In C. Casanave & S. Vandrick (Eds.), Writing for scholarly publication: Behind the scenes in language education (pp. 197–210). Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Clyne, M. (1987). Cultural differences in the organization of academic texts: English and German. Journal of Pragmatics, 11, 211–247.
Fedotov, G. P. (1946). The Russian religious mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Flowerdew, J. (2008). What can Goffman’s Stigma tell us about scholarly writers who use English as an additional language? Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 7(2), 77–86.
Huckin, T. (1987, March). Surprise value in scientific discourse. Paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), Atlanta, USA.
Ivanic, R. (1998). Writing and identity: The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Neuilep, J. (2003). Intercultural communication: A contextual approach. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. (2001). Intercultural communication: A discourse approach. Malden: Blackwell.
Swales, J. M. (2004). Research genres: Exploration and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Uzuner, S. (2008). Multilingual scholars’ participation in core/global academic communities: A literature review. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 7(4), 250–263.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Netherlands
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Yousoubova, L. (2011). Genre and Disciplinarity: The Challenge of Grant Writing for New Non-Anglophone Scientists. In: McAlpine, L., Amundsen, C. (eds) Doctoral Education: Research-Based Strategies for Doctoral Students, Supervisors and Administrators. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0507-4_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0507-4_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-0506-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-0507-4
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawEducation (R0)