University of Helsinki Department of English

Written academic ELF (WrELFA)

Writing and publishing in English is all-important in the making of academic careers. Many academics for whom English is not the first language worry about their language – often about its correctness and ‘native-likeness’. Yet the majority of the readers of academic research publications are not native speakers of English.  Effective academic text nevertheless hinges more on the quality of its contents, the strength of its argument, and the coherence of its rhetorical organisation than the details of correctness relative to Standard English. Reader responses to such matters are culturally variable, as was shown in Contrastive Rhetoric research in the 1990s. The current world of academic writing and publishing is far more globalised than it was a decade or two ago. Yet we have no research evidence on the determinants of effectiveness in academic rhetoric in a world that is permeated by English as a lingua franca, and a constant flow of cultural influences from a variety of sources. Speed in publishing findings has also become a major issue in academia. New ways of making findings public are developing in a variety of online forms, which know no national or local boundaries.

Project WrELFA collects and analyses academic texts written in English as a lingua franca. The texts cover high-stakes genres in different fields, both published and unpublished. Among our target text types are evaluative reports, such as examiners' and peer reviewers’ reports. Our aim is to cover academic writing practices on a broad scale, ranging from texts circulated within academia to texts that reach the wider public.