Exploring regimes of academic writing: introduction to the special issue

Writing is pervasive in the context of higher education. Scholars write various kinds of texts for research, teaching as well as administrative purposes, and students are required, for example, to produce much of their course work in writing. This pervasiveness of writing in academia has not gone unnoticed by researchers, and abundance of research exists on academic writing from various perspectives, both drawing on text-oriented approaches (for overviews, see e.g. Bazerman and Prior 2004; Hewings 2001) and those that are more focused on the contexts and practices of writing (for developments in the field, see e.g. Juzwik et al. 2006). This special issue is a contribution to the more contextualised approaches; it draws particularly on academic literacy (e.g. Barton and Hamilton 2000; Lillis and Scott 2007) and the sociolinguistics of writing (e.g. Blommaert 2013; Lillis 2013; Lillis and McKinney 2013). In the contributions, writing is treated as observable practice, a process that takes place under specific material conditions, in interaction with various ‘literacy brokers’ (Lillis and Curry 2006), and within particular disciplinary and organisational frames.

The seeds of this special issue, entitled ‘Regimes of Academic Writing’, are in a colloquium I co-organised with Anna Solin and Janus Mortensen at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 21 in Murcia, Spain, in 2016. The focus is on the writing practices of researchers and students, and in particular, on how these practices both shape and are shaped by specific regimes of writing that regulate writers’ choices of language and genre, as well as the kind of language the writers may use in specific settings and for specific genres. The contributions draw on data collected at universities in the UK, Denmark, Finland and Sweden, and approach the theme of the special issue from different perspectives.

A key concept is ‘language regime’, which Kroskrity (2000) uses to draw attention to connections between language, ideologies, politics and identity. Language regimentation in this view is a means to control the ways in which people use language. In research on language policy and planning, this regimentation has often been associated with, above all, questions of choice between languages in different situations, or as Liu (2015: 137) puts it, ‘which languages can be used when and where’. For instance, Gazzola defines a language regime as a ‘particular form of public policy’ (2014: 2), a ‘set of rules and arrangements implemented to manage multilingual communication, typically as regards to the choice of official languages of an organisation and their respective use’ (2014: 10). Similarly, Coulmas (2005: 7) defines a language regime ‘as a set of constraints on individual language choices’. Gazzola (2014) applies the concept to any form of organisation, emphasising the importance of rules and arrangements in governing languages, whereas Coulmas (2005) emphasises how the interaction of the three components of habits, legal provisions and ideologies may generate pressure for adjusting the language regimes.

Yet another approach is provided by Sonntag and Cardinal (2015a, 2015b), who, writing from a political science perspective, link language regimes to state traditions, and highlight the central role of the state’s administrative, institutional and normative traditions in guiding language policy choices. For Sonntag and Cardinal (2015a: 13), a language regime refers to language practices as well as conceptions and representations of language and language use as projected through state policies and as acted upon by language users. State traditions guide and frame those practices and conceptions and these, in turn, are acted upon by language users.

This importance of the state’s central role is also acknowledged by Blommaert (2005: 119–220; see also 2010), who suggests that the state is often a ‘determining’ force in the sociolinguistic landscape, whereas the effect of other evaluative authorities may best be described as ‘dominant’. In the context of higher education, as well, the state tends to be an important actor in providing laws and regulations for language use. For instance, the University of Helsinki is legally obligated to provide instruction in the two national languages of Finland, Finnish and Swedish. Consequently, even though the Universities Act (558/2009) further stipulates that the university may also use other languages than the two, law determines the status of the two languages. It is thus important to acknowledge the determining force of the state in forming language regimes. At the same time, however, highlighting the centrality of the state blurs the ‘polycentricity’ of interactional regimes (Blommaert 2010). In order to understand specific language policies and practices in the higher education context, it thus seems necessary also to pay attention to how language regimes are manifested at the institutional level (cf. Gazzola 2014), as well as to what are the evaluative authorities language users actually orient to in their daily practices. For instance, for academic writing, it may be assumed that some of these authorities are supranational, since universities as institutions need to cater for disciplinary internationalisation (e.g. Saarinen 2014). Similarly, writers may also need to consider how their institution evaluates publications in different languages – this in effect being a different language regime potentially of importance to writers.

Common to the definitions of language regime discussed above is that language regimes are seen to constrain language choices. In the special issue, a broader perspective is adopted, and language regimes are seen to concern also language quality and hence to govern what kind of language may be used when and where. The contributions thus shed light on regimes of academic writing by drawing on both senses of the notion, that is, how language regimes constrain language choice (Mortensen; Salö) as well as language quality (Mäntynen; Mortensen; Solin & Hynninen) of academic writing. Since the focus is on regimes of academic writing, also other than language regimes may play a role: the contributions by Salö and Tusting shed light on how genre choices are constrained.

While the contributions approach the theme of the special issue from different perspectives, what is common to the papers is an understanding that ‘the conditioned and normative […] unfolds in the contingencies of situated activity’ (Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck 2005: 213). The momentary is always shaped by conditions created earlier, but it has the potential to shape conditions as well. All of the contributions draw on at least some data from writers of academic texts to explicate this situated activity and how it relates to regimes governing writing practices. It is important to note that while these regimes frame writing at particular points in time, they also position the writing within a historical framework. Thus, one key thing that the authors highlight is that research and student writing is always historically and socially situated, also in the processes of producing that writing.

All papers in this special issue in some ways deal with the dynamics between institutional structures and practice. Tusting focuses on how national and institutional evaluation practices influence researchers’ choices concerning the types of texts they write and where they publish, whereas Solin and Hynninen explore the interplay between researchers’ practices and the language-regulatory mechanisms in the institutional setting they work in. With focus on a specific student-writing genre, Mäntynen considers the complex evaluation process around this genre, whereas Mortensen is concerned with shifts in normative orientations in a student group work setting. Salö’s discussion concerns the regimentation of a particular student-writing genre from the viewpoints of advocates, policymakers and practitioners. Ultimately the question is what ‘counts’ as acceptable writing, whether in terms of what the appropriate genre, language or linguistic form is like, and what are the regimes that individuals orient to as meaningful (see Lillis 2013).

In order to approach what language regimes may be relevant for writers, some of the contributors in this special issue (Mäntynen, Mortensen and Solin & Hynninen) draw on the concept of ‘language regulation’ (Hynninen 2016; Hynninen & Solin 2017) and explore not only institutional mechanisms of regulation but also situated practices of intervening in language. A focus on language-regulatory practices makes it possible to consider writer orientations to different norms, and to see which ones are implemented, ignored or contested in practice. The contributions in this special issue, presented in more detail below, illustrate how writers display orientations to multiple normative systems, which suggests that multiple language and genre regimes of academic writing are at work.

The first paper in the special issue, by Karin Tusting, focuses on the impact of the UK national research assessment process, the Research Evaluation Framework (REF), on academics’ writing practices. She argues that the REF, and how it is mediated through institutional and departmental strategies, has led to the development of a ‘genre regime’ that privileges particular genres of academic writing and particular locations of publication. The study, which draws on interviews with academics in a range of disciplines and institutions, shows that the national and institutional evaluation practices have differential impact on academics, depending on how well the genre regime of the REF matches with the genre regime of the disciplinary knowledge tradition. Based on the findings, Tusting concludes that strategic motivations deriving from institutional frameworks such as the REF have become more and more important for academics, to the extent that they may actually influence processes of knowledge production of research itself. The study thus sheds light on the potentially powerful impact of national and institutional mechanisms of regulating academic writing.

Anna Solin and Niina Hynninen’s contribution is concerned with practices of regulating the language of research writing. The study explores the various processes of regulating – whether institutionally or in the practices of research groups – what in the context of English-language research writing counts as appropriate, acceptable and functional English. The paper reports of a case study conducted at a computer science department in a large Nordic university, where almost all of the research writing is done in English. The focus is both on the institutional language-regulatory practices that are in place in this context, which potentially produce interventions in research writing, and on the ways that research writers describe interventions in the language of their writing as part of the writing processes of research groups. Combining the institutional and research writer perspectives sheds some new light on the variety of evaluative regimes in which research writing is embedded. The findings illustrate that the writer participants oriented to multiple normative orders, but more strongly to the global disciplinary community than their organisational one.

Anne Mäntynen investigates the practices of regulating the language of student writing at a Finnish university. Her focus is on a specific form of such writing, the maturity test. This test is a compulsory part of a bachelor’s degree in Finnish universities by which students are expected to demonstrate their familiarity with the topic of their thesis as well as their skills in their first language. The process of evaluating the tests, in this case bachelor’s thesis abstracts written in Finnish, consists of several steps, and Mäntynen’s analysis focuses on one of these, that is, feedback conversations with the author of the abstract and a language reviser. The findings suggest that the students and language revisers orient to a variety of different norms when evaluating the acceptability of the abstract as a maturity exam, that is, as a text that shows acceptable skills in the candidate’s L1. Mäntynen’s study thus sheds light on what systems of norms are relevant in the evaluation process and how those systems of norms are viewed in relation to one another as more or less important. The study highlights the polycentricity of norms and the negotiability of them in the everyday linguistic practices of higher education.

Janus Mortensen presents an analysis of student group work interaction at a Danish university, with focus on those parts of the interaction where the students co-produce written language. Mortensen explores how language choice and quality are negotiated within the group, and what norms and policies the students orient to in their negotiations. The findings illustrate that while the writing process is multilingual, the written products the students produce are monolingually in English. Moreover, in the process of discussing their group work and producing drafts of their text, it appeared to be more important for the students to ‘get the message across’; whereas the closer the students moved towards the final product, the more they oriented to external normative expectations related to, for instance, the linguistic form of their writing. Mortensen’s findings thus illustrate how the collaborative writing process included the students orienting to slightly different normative footings in the course of the group work, both in terms of choosing which linguistic resources to use, and what kind of language they thought was expected of them.

The final paper, by Linus Salö, focuses on how a particular genre, the Swedish-language summary (SLS) of doctoral theses, functions as a regimenting practice in the context of Swedish higher education. Salö approaches the topic by considering the rationales behind the regimenting practice of SLS as perceived by those who promote the practice (advocates), those who actually regiment (policy-makers), and those whose writing practices the regimentation concerns (practitioners). The findings show that there seems to be a general ambiguity surrounding the reasons for promoting SLSs, and that this ambiguity is further reflected in the practices of doctoral students, who may not take the SLS seriously despite policies imposing the practice. Salö concludes that while the SLS may be intended to serve both knowledge-bridging between scholars and lay people and register formation, that is, upholding Swedish as a viable language of science, these two intentions may be impossible to combine by this one genre. Salö’s study is an important reminder that policies may be based on different, potentially incompatible, rationales, and that for policies to be successfully implemented in practice, practitioners need to recognise their value.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Kone Foundation under Grant [number 088787].