ENEIDA Project

ENEIDA Project > BACKGROUND

In recent decades, there has been a growing trend of publishing in English-medium journals among multilingual researchers (Lillis and Curry, 2010). This has led to a heightened demand for materials (Swales and Feak, 2004) and courses tailored to English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) (Moreno 2011).

Table 1. Early English for Research Publication Courses for Spanish scholars

Institution	Initial year	Framework for course	Course name	Disciplinary field	Duration
University of Córdoba	1984 (* 1987)	Acciones Integradas research project	ESP course for science researchers	Science	10 h. (*2)
University of Zaragoza	1997 (every two years)	ICE (Education Sciences Institute)	Estrategias de Escritura Académica en Inglés	Science and technology, mainly	25 h. approx
Jaume I University	1999 (every two years)	Language Services Centre at the university	How to write research articles in English	Mixed: all fields at the university	20 h.
CSIC (Madrid and Barcelona)	2004 2007	Continuing professional development plan	Inglés científico (IC) IC: intermedio/ Avanzado	Unspecified	20 h. 20 h.
University of Zaragoza	2006	University internationalisation programme	Curso de Escritura Académica en Inglés	Business and Economics	30h.
University of La Laguna	2005-2007	Staff training programme	Publishing skills in English	Psychology	30 h.
University of Zaragoza	2008 (*in press) 2008-2009	Centre for Academic Writing in English for the humanities Staff training programme en diferentes	Curso de Escritura Académica en Inglés Curso de Escritura Académica en Inglés	Humanities Social sciences, biomedicine, engineering	20 h. 30 h.
University of Barcelona	2008	Continuing professional development plan	Habilitats de publicació científica per al PDI	Pedagogy, social work	30 h.

(* = published experiences) (Moreno, 2011)

Research into academic writing has also flourished globally (Swales 2004; Cargill & Burgess, 2008). Cross-cultural and intercultural studies of academic discourse across various languages and English have become increasingly important (Connor, 2004; Moreno, 2010).

Despite these developments, there is still little understanding of the ERPP training needs for writers for whom English is an Additional Language (EAL) and the most effective ways to address these needs through teaching resources (Swales, 2002). This issue is particularly relevant to Spanish researchers (Burgess, & Fagan, 2006; Pérez-Llantada et al, 2010).

The ENEIDA project targets the overlooked population of Spanish EAL writers. It advocates a critical pragmatic approach that simultaneously addresses access and difference. Thus, the project emphasises the importance of focusing on specific aspects of ERPP writing with which Spanish researchers tend to have difficulties when communicating with an international audience (intercultural perspective).

Additionally, based on revealing results from Spanish-English cross-cultural studies of academic discourse, the project seeks to explain some of Spanish researchers’ writing problems —or WOEs, writing obstacles in English (Moreno et al., 2012)— by virtue of the contrastive rhetoric hypothesis (Kaplan, 2001), according to which writers from different cultural and language backgrounds have distinct preferences for articulating messages with share a similar purpose (cross-cultural perspective).

Table 2. Selected English-Spanish cross-cultural studies of research articles (RAs) and abstracts

Authors	Rhetorical or stylish feature under comparison	Full genre or part-genre	(Sub-) disciplinary field
Pérez Ruiz (1999)	rhetorical structure	RA abstracts	Epidemiology
Burguess (2002)	rhetorical structure	Introductions to RAs	Linguistics
Martín-Martín (2003)	rhetorical structure	RA abstracts	Linguistics
Mur Dueñas (2008) (2009)	engagement markers Citations	RAs RAs	business management business management

Table 3. Results from ENEIDA (Moreno et al, 2011)

Training should familiarize them with the problems Spanish authors typically have when writing RAs	N	%	Total
English	536	56.1	956
Spanish	123	35.3	348

It was believed that raising Spanish researchers’ awareness of cross-cultural differences in ERPP writing related to audience types (national/local versus international) would help them to produce more successful texts in the eyes of English-medium journal gatekeepers.

Results from our own project have demonstrated that well over half of these researchers believe that training in ERPP should familiarise them with the problems Spanish authors typically have when writing RAs in English (see Table 3). Thus, we are confident about the usefulness of our results and feel encouraged to continue exploring the Spanish-English contrastive rhetoric hypothesis in academic publication contexts.