Academic Writing in a Global Context

Counteracting Domain Loss and Epistemicide in Specialized Discourse: A Case Study on the Translation of Anglophone Metaphors to French

“…Due to the massive economic and cultural influence of the United States, the dominance of English has strongly impacted the dissemination of information and innovation in scientific and economic fields internationally [3,8]. Innovation tends to be formulated in one language only, i.e., English, thus precluding other cultures from developing their own conceptualization through their native lexico-semantic patterns.…”

“…LAP (and EAP or English for Academic Purposes) is in fact only one "social practice" [3] (p. 19) epistemicide [1] is more clearly measurable in the scientific field due to the influence of the "impact factor" [3] (p. [17][18], the dominance of English has profoundly modified a whole range of specialized fields' textual productions, starting from research to reach all stages of application (e.g., patents, technical instructions, norms) [13]. Therefore, the issue of epistemicide and domain loss is not only relevant to LAP, but also to all the LSPs in their diversity, albeit in specific ways.…”

“…Awareness of this risk has developed lately in the field of academic discourse analysis [1][2][3] and various leads have been offered to counter the exclusion of non-English speakers, who tend to be considered as "peripheral writers" [4,5]. However, the dominance of English does not only impact scientific and academic discourse, but also the whole range of professional and technical texts grouped under specialized discourse.…”

Developing autonomy through portfolios and networks in CLIL lectures

“…It was hoped that content teachers would be consulted as report themes were related to content curriculum themes, however, only 7 of 292 responses was disappointingly low. It would appear then that this data reveals an emerging "network" (Lillis & Curry, 2010) of materials, resources, and brokers which aid literacy development. Brokers who provided direct guidance about the report-"literacy brokers" (Lillis & Curry, 2010, p.93) -and resources accessed were clearly drawn in the maps; however, the "network brokers" (Curry & Lillis, 2010, p. 283) who could not give students direct help themselves but could point them to others better able to do so were not so apparent from these maps.…”

Reconsidering the Role of Language-in-Education Policies in Multilingual Higher Education Contexts

“…The focus here is on what is regarded as valid knowledge, in the sense of the kind of knowledge that is regarded as noteworthy, even when it is contextbound. Lillis and Curry (2010) illustrate the way in which local knowledge is devalued when reviewers of international journals ask authors to demonstrate a link with international concerns, or when they are encouraged to move beyond their own context. The link between local language(s) and local knowledge is important to support learning, and to act as a bridge or a foil to knowledge presented in dominant languages.…”