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Review of: Academic writing in a global context: The politics and practices of publishing in English, Theresa Lillis

and Mary Jane Curry. London and New York: Routledge, (2010) (pp. 203), ISBN 9780415468831.18.25/US$44.95

(paperback).

Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Currys book is a welcome addition to the growing body of research into the

dominance of English as the language of academic writing for publication. Drawing on their eight-year longitudinal

research project on the academic writing experiences and practices of 50 multilingual scholars,Academic Writing ina Global Contextexamines the impact of the global status of English on their lives. Using a text-oriented ethnographic

approach to examine the nature of these scholars writing experiences Lillis and Curry contribute much to our

understanding of text production and knowledge-making practices in a global world in this highly engaging book.

Informed by the works of Jan Blommaert, Pierre Bourdieu, Suresh Canagarajah, Roz Ivanic and John Swales, among

others,Academic Writing in a Global Contextcritically examines the politics of text production, exchange, and evaluation

across national and transnational boundaries. It also critically evaluates approaches which focus too closely on academic

writing as individual competence rather than the result of networked activity (Casanave, 1998) and argues for the need to

decentre academic text production and [text] evaluation practices which will benefit scholars globally (p. 155).

The book has been divided into seven chapters, each of which includes a description of the specific methodological

tool used to examine the central issues in the chapter, a number of profiles of the scholars to illustrate these issues, and

valuable suggestions for further reading. The first four chapters are necessarily more descriptive in nature as they

introduce the background against which the remainingd

more polemicald

chapters have been written. Whilst the

discussions in chapters 1 to 4 explore differences and diversities across the communities and networks presented in the

book, those in chapters 5 to 7 focus on ideologies, knowledge and power. This arrangement has given the book

a flexibility not often found in books of this type. As the authors themselves suggest, readers can start by delving into

the debates about the larger picture presented in the last three chapters or by acquainting themselves with the

background and detail introduced in the first four.

Chapter 1,"English and the politics of academic knowledge production, sets the scene for the rest of the chapters in

the book. It examines central issues in the production of texts for publication such as the geopolitical location of texts,

producers and language, with specific reference to four national sites (Hungary, Slovakia, Spain and Portugal) as

examples of centre contexts which are also peripheral in a number of ways (p. 5) although these issues could very

easily apply to other sites such as Latin-American countries. Central to the discussions presented in this chapter are the

global position of English as the language of academic publication, the privileged status in the academy of the journalarticle, the impact factor of journals, and the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) index, all of which influence

academic text production and knowledge creation.

Writing for publication in a globalized world is the title of Chapter 2. This chapter presents a critical and detailed

examination of what is at stake for multilingual scholars who live and work outside the Anglo-centre. The chapter

examines the complexities of scholars having to write in English, the communities they write for, and the decisions

they are faced with about writing nationally and/or transnationally, together with the factors that influence these

decisions: systems of regulations and rewards and the central role of English in funded research projects.

Chapter 3, Mobilizing resources for text production, academic research networks, has two main aims: to

problematize the emphasis in certain approaches on writing as individual competence, and to illustrate how the

success in English-medium publishing of these scholars largely depends on networked activity. Lillis and Curry open

up the chapter with a critical analysis of approaches to researching and teaching writing that see it as individualperformance rather than a process that relies on the collaboration of a range of people" (p. 63). Against this argument

and based on their observations of the writing practices of the participating scholars, the authors demonstrate how

multilingual scholars are able to access crucial material as well as linguistic and rhetorical resources needed for

publishing in English through national and transnational networks that include colleagues, mentors, and brokers. This

examination paves the way for chapter 4: Texts and literacy brokers". As its title suggests, this chapter examines the

wide variety of brokering activities involved in academic text production and publishing. Throughout the chapter, the

authors analyse different kinds of interventions by people other than the authors of texts such as professional language

brokers, proofreaders, journal reviewers, to mention just a few, but specifically focus on what they call language

brokers (e.g. translators, proofreaders) and academic brokers (e.g. colleagues, journal editors). Lillis and Curry

demonstrate how these interventions, which are more frequent in texts written for international journals that publish in

English only, impact not only the processes of text production but also the professional lives of the multilingual

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scholar. The chapter provides interesting insights into the professional and, sometimes, personal struggles of the

participating scholars when they have to respond to conflicting reviews and to calls for simplification and minor and

major revisions, practices most readers ofAcademic Writing in a Global Context, including myself, will be familiar

with.

The last three chapters of the book continue exploring the issues presented in the first four chapters but from a more

macro perspective, providing a crafty link between the local and the global in the politics of knowledge making. Chapter

5, Staying local going global? Working at Enlightenment Science, explores the importance of the local and the

global in the lives of scholars, illustrating the central meanings of "local as a geographic reality or a research focus and

interest, and those of global as transnational research communities in several scholars accounts and writing practices.

The chapter concludes with an insightful analysis of the powerful ideology of Science which seems to permeate the

professional lives and writing for publication practices of the scholars. Chapter 6 is closely related to chapter 5 in that it

further elaborates on issues of knowledge making in the global academic community which still clearly differentiates

between the Anglophone at the centre and the non-Anglophone scholars mostly at the periphery, and their respective

scientific production (Canagarajah, 2002, 2005). Chapter 6 shows the various attempts, linguistic and otherwise, of

scholars to cross these boundaries and the resistance they normally find embodied in the text evaluation practices of the

centre, where local may be seen as too local or too parochial for global interpretation and consumption.

Chapter 7, the last chapter in the book, aims at decentring these practices in academic text production and eval-

uation. The chapter starts with a critical evaluation of the current practices of text production in which English enjoyssupremacy over the local languages. Against this picture, Lillis and Curry outline specific ways in which present

practices could be changed: making invisible ideologies visible, sustaining local languages for research and publi-

cation, and supporting knowledge as a gift economy through, for instance, open access journals and academic blogs.

Although chapter 7 is also meant to close the book, I would have preferreda concluding chapter which could,for instance,

have elaborated on the last paragraph of the chapter about the authors own experiences in conducting their longitudinal

study and writing this book. The book would also have gained from a further elaboration of the some of the innovative

research tools that the authors used for their longitudinal study and in the book. Their text-oriented heuristic is one case in

point. Although the heuristic is explained andelaborated in theauthors previous work (Lillis& Curry, 2006), an explanation

of how it was utilised in their analysis of text histories, for instance, would have benefited the readers of this book.

In sum,Academic Writing in a Global Contextrepresents a ground-breaking approach to analysing the politics and

practices of academic writing for publication. The book makes an invaluable contribution to the fields of appliedlinguistics, teaching and researching writing in general and academic literacies in particular, and teaching English as

a second and foreign language. It will no doubt be of interest to researchers and teachers in these fields and become

part of the lists of highly recommended readings in postgraduate programmes in these areas.

References

Canagarajah, A. S. (2002). A geopolitics of academic writing. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Canagarajah, A. S. (2005). Reconstructing local knowledge, reconfiguring language studies. In A. S. Canagarajah (Ed.), Reclaiming the local in

language policy and practice (pp. 3e24). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Casanave, C. P. (1998). Transitions: the balancing act of bilingual academics. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12(1), 175e203.

Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2006). Professional academic writing by multilingual scholars: interactions with literacy brokers in the production of

English-medium texts. Written Communication, 23(1), 3e35.

Julio Gimenez

Centre for English Language Education (CELE),

The University of Nottingham,

UK International House, Jubilee Campus,

Wollaton Road, Nottingham NG8 1BB, United Kingdom

* Tel.: 44 115 951 4407; fax: 44 115 951 4992.

E-mail address: julio.gimenez@nottingham.ac.uk

doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2010.11.003

69Book reviews / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 10 (2011) 61e69