Theresa LillisThe Open University (UK) · Centre for Language and Communications;
Theresa Lillis
B.A., MPhil, PGCE, PhD
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106
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6,072
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Citations since 2017
Publications
Publications (106)
This paper explores the procedural ethics and ethics in practice involved in a multi-agency research project exploring professional social work writing. Drawing on institutional documentation and a researcher’s field notes over two years, the requirements and processes involved in complying with academia-facing and agency-facing regulatory framewor...
The use of ‘text history’ and ‘text trajectory’ constitutes an epistemological break from historically static approaches to the study of academic writing for publication. However, there is a need to further develop dynamic approaches to professional academic text production in ways which are robustly grounded in scholars’ lived practices. The paper...
This paper introduces a paired text history methodology to explore the citation practices of three experienced Russian scholars in philosophy, sociology, and economics. The empirical focus is on the analysis of three paired text histories, comparing Russian-medium research articles with English-medium research articles in each discipline. By analyz...
Buscamos discutir algunos presupuestos sobre el uso del inglés como “lengua franca” en contextos científico-académicos, identificar el impacto de estos presupuestos en las trayectorias de producción y recepción de conocimientos, y legitimar el uso de múltiples lenguas para el intercambio académico transnacional. Proponemos diez principios: el uso d...
We aim to challenge assumptions made about the use of English as a "lingua franca" in scientific-academic contexts, identify the impact of such assumptions on trajectories of knowledge production and uptake, and legitimize the use of multiple languages for transnational scholarly exchange. We set out ten principles: Using English as a scientific-ac...
The use of ‘text history’ and ‘text trajectory’ constitutes an epistemological break from historically static approaches to the study of academic writing for publication, towards deeper understandings of textual academic knowledge making. However, there is a need to further develop dynamic approaches to professional academic text production in ways...
We aim to challenge assumptions made about the use of English as a “lingua franca” in scientific-academic contexts, identify the impact of such assump- tions on trajectories of knowledge production and uptake, and legitimize the use of multiple languages for transnational scholarly exchange. We set out ten principles: Using English as a scientific-...
We are living in an era characterized by multilingualism, global mobility, superdiversity (Blommaert, 2010), and digital communications. Mobility and multilingualism, however, have long characterized most geolinguistic contexts, including those where monolingual ideologies have influenced the formation of contemporary nation states (Cenoz, 2013). A...
Corpus linguistics is increasingly employed to explore large, publicly-available datasets such as newspaper texts, government speeches and online fora. However, comparatively few corpora exist where the subject matter concerns sensitive topics about living individuals since, due to their highly personal and confidential nature, these texts are hard...
Written texts mediate action and serve as accounts of action in most contemporary professional domains. Echoing Candlin’s call for applied and social linguists to explore ‘critical moments’ in discourse, I argue that ‘writing’ constitutes just such a critical moment, because of its contested position in professional domains and the dominant ideolog...
Monogrāfijā ir apkopotas un izvērtētas starptautiskās un latviešu valodniecības un zinātniskās komunikācijas pētniecības atziņas par zinātnes valodu un ar to saistītajiem aspektiem, atspoguļots pētījums par latviešu zinātnisko rakstu makrostruktūru un mikrostruktūru un sniegti priekšlikumi un ieteikumi tālākajiem pētījumiem. Grāmatu veido sešas nod...
Contemporary professional social work can be characterised by increased textualisation (after Iedema and Scheeres 2003) with written texts mediating most action. At the same time, writing, as a key dimension to social workers’ practice and labour, is often institutionally unacknowledged, becoming visible primarily when identified as a “problem.” Th...
A growing strand of work in ERPP (English for research publication purposes) explores how English is nested within research evaluation regimes in non-Anglophone contexts across the world. This paper focuses on the under-researched context of Russia, where language of research publication is at the heart of tensions in institutional, national and in...
En este artículo, desde su implicación temprana en el campo de investigación y práctica conocido como literacidades académicas, la investigadora británica Theresa Lillis reconstruye el contexto en el que surge dicho campo, define sus principales intereses de indagación y enseñanza, y resume sus contribuciones, durante veinte años, a la comprensión...
Drawing on a three-year ethnographically oriented study exploring contemporary professional social work writing, this article focuses on a key concern: the amount of time taken up with writing, or “paperwork.” We explore the relationship between time and professional social work writing in three key ways: (a) as a discrete, measurable phenomenon—ho...
Social work writing, often referred to as ‘recording’ or ‘paperwork’, is frequently the target of criticism in reviews and public media reporting in the UK. However, despite the many criticisms made and its significance in social work practice, little empirical research has been carried out on professional social work writing. This
paper draws on...
In the past three decades, a body of research on issues related to multilingual scholars writing for publication has emerged, paralleling the rise of pressures on scholars around the world to publish their work in high-status journals, especially those included in particular journal citation indexes; these indexes typically privilege the use of Eng...
This paper explores the significance of gender in research and academic writing for publication. It reports on a gender-focused, interview-based study with 10 multilingual women scholars, set within a longitudinal research project in which they have participated for between 11 and 14 years. The scholars work in two disciplinary fields, education an...
This is an edited collection of research reports on the current state of global academic publishing. It was published in November 2017. Please don't ask us to share the full, published book. It's available to purchase on the Multilingual Matters website. Request for copies will not be responded to.
Drawing on a text-oriented action research ethnography of the writing practices of UK-based social workers, this paper focuses on a key but problematic aspect of everyday, professional textual practice – the production of “case notes.” Using data drawn from interviews, workshops, texts and observation, the paper locates case notes within social wor...
This paper puts the spotlight on the dominant 'imaginary' (Castoriadis 1987) governing writing research, focusing in particular on the way in which evaluation regimes shape analytic orientations towards writing as a phenomenon. Drawing on data from three different research projects- student writing ( e.g. Lillis 2001), scholars' writing for publica...
Drawing on 95 text histories from a longitudinal project on writing for publication in 4 national contexts, this article analyses the language ideologies enacted in referees’ and editors’ comments on articles submitted for publication in English-medium ‘international’ journals. It considers how orientations to ‘English’, ‘language’ and ‘language wo...
This seminar took place on 19 April, 2013 at the Centre for Language and Communication, Faculty of Language and Education Studies, The Open University. The seminar was coordinated by Janet Maybin and Theresa Lillis and there were 28 participants, including four postgraduate students, from universities in Britain, Belgium and South Africa.
This surninar took place on 19 April, 2013 at the Get t for Language and Cot munication, Faculty of Languagu and Education Studies, The Open University The selnillar was coordinated by Janet klaybin and Theresa Lillis and there were 28 participants, includify four postgraduate students, from universities in Britain, Belgium awl South :kfrica.
In the past decade, academic evaluation systems worldwide have markedly increased the use of mechanisms that privilege the use of English in journal publishing. In the context of these trends, this article highlights our findings from more than 12 years of research on the experiences and perspectives of 50 multilingual European scholars with writin...
Language professionals, namely translators, editors, language teachers and other writing consultants, support academic publication in various ways, but the full scope of their work remains largely unexplored. Greater understanding of the nature of the activities undertaken would help authors identify the most appropriate language professionals to s...
In this paper, we argue that writing has largely been ignored as a
significant empirical object of study in sociolinguistics. Pointing to the
consequences of the specific ways in which writing has been positioned
historically within sociolinguistics, we discuss the need to re-imagine
writing as an object of study and problematize the dominant lense...
Writing plays a central role in social work practice and in the qualifying programmes studied by student social workers. The research on which this paper is based explores the value of writing undertaken in higher education to writing for professional practice in social work. Drawing on data sources from a ‘text oriented ethnography’, this paper ex...
This book brings the study of writing to the heart of sociolinguistic inquiry.
Beaucoup d'etudiants, dans l'enseignement superieur, suivent des cours a orientation professionnelle. Cet article se focalise sur un projet d’« ethnographie du texte », concernant l’ecriture des assistants sociaux pendant leur formation et sur leur terrain professionnel, avec cinq assistants sociaux comme co-chercheurs. L’article examine les ressem...
This chapter discusses a mentoring programme funded by an international journal aimed at supporting authors from a range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds to submit papers for publication. The rationale underpinning the programme is discussed, including the particular roles and responsibilities that 'anglophone centre' journals have in the con...
The semiotic world that we inhabit (within and outside the academy) is fast changing in terms of the resources that are used and the practices in which many engage. Yet the institutional norms governing highly consequential academic texts – students’ texts assessed as part of their disciplinary-based activity and scholars’ papers submitted for publ...
Academic Writing in a Global Context addresses the issue of the pressure on academics worldwide to produce their work in English in scholarly publishing, and why the growth of the use of academic English matters. Drawing on an eight year ‘text-ethnographic’ study of the experiences of fifty scholars working in Europe, this book discusses these ques...
Scholars around the world are under increasing pressure to publish in English, in Anglophone centre journals. At the same time, research on professional academic writing indicates that scholars from outside Anglophone centre contexts face considerable obstacles in getting their academic work published in such journals, relating to material and ling...
Multilingual scholars located outside of Anglophone contexts face growing pressure to publish in English. Evidence from a longitudinal “text-ethnographic” study exploring how 50 psychology and education scholars in southern and central Europe are responding to such pressure indicates that individual linguistic and rhetorical competence alone are us...
Citation is a key means by which authors signal their affiliation to their disciplinary community and the place of their work within it. Choices made regarding what work to cite is a crucial aspect of the interpersonal dimension of academic texts, with the act of citing making visible a network of scholarly relations. Citation choices indicate, amo...
To explore how the global status of English influences knowledge production and circulation, this paper focuses on citations in English-medium national and English-medium international journal articles. Drawing on text, ethnographic, and corpus data from a longitudinal study in four national contexts, we argue that citation practices vary significa...
This book reports on almost a decade of ethnographic research on the academic writing and publishing practices of 50 scholars of education and psychology located in central and southern Europe.
About the book: This volume presents a union of theoretical and practical pedagogical perspectives on materials design and development. This volume provides an incisive overview of the current state of materials design in language teaching. Seventeen original chapters explore the issues involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of mate...
Applied Linguistics Methods: A Reader presents the student with three contemporary approaches for investigating text, practices and contexts in which language-related problems are implicated. Divided into three parts, the reader focuses in turn on the different approaches, showing how each is relevant to addressing real world problems, including th...
Academic literacies research has developed over the past 20 years as a significant field of study that draws on a number of disciplinary fields and subfields such as applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociocultural theories of learning, new literacy studies and discourse studies. Whilst there is fluidity and even confusion surr...
This article critically explores the value of ethnography for enhancing context-sensitive approaches to the study of academic writing. Drawing on data from two longitudinal studies, student writing in the United Kingdom and professional academic writing in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal, the author illustrates the different contributions et...
The dominance of English as the global language of scholarly publishing in almost every academic field is well documented. More than 90% of the social science journals indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information (Thompson Corp., 2008) and 80% of the 59,591 scholarly periodicals indexed by Ulrich’s Periodical Directory (2007) are published i...
About the book: Learning English focuses on young children's acquisition of spoken and written English in monolingual and bilingual contexts and explores the debates surrounding English in schools and colleges, and the often controversial nature of the English curriculum in different parts of the world. English is learned in most parts of the world...
Scholars around the world are under increasing pressure to publish their research in the medium of English. However, little empirical research has explored how the global premium of English influences the academic text production of scholars working outside of English-speaking countries. This article draws on a longitudinal text-oriented ethnograph...
About the book: Academic Writing is emerging as a distinct subject for teaching and research in higher education in the UK and elsewhere. Teaching Academic Writing in UK Higher Education introduces this growing field and provides a resource for university teachers, researchers and administrators interested in developing students' writing.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
“Communicative competence” was developed by Dell Hymes to describe, and account for, the knowledge that speakers and listeners have in order to communicate appropriately in different social contexts. It is a central notion in sociolinguistics and other socially oriented approaches to the study of language. This article aims to define the term as us...
This article examines how multilingual scholars who work outside English-speaking countries negotiate the demand to publish in English alongside their broader academic and publishing interests. Based on our ethnographic study of the academic writing and publishing practices of 16 psychology scholars in Hungary, Slovakia and Spain, we characterize t...
Sociolinguistics is characterised by increasing heterogeneity, and students are faced with a proliferation of theories, concepts and terminology. This is sometimes a minefield, with similar terms used rather differently within different academic traditions. The dictionary provides a broad coverage of sociolinguistics, including macro- and micro-soc...
This reader provides an accessible collection of readings which illustrate both the current variation in research on language and literacy and the common underlying themes. It is made up of twenty chapters, of which eight have been specially commissioned. Together they illustrate some of the ways in which researchers are grappling with key question...
A body of research has recently emerged in the UK which adopts an ‘academic literacies’ stance towards student writing. An ‘academic literacies’ stance conceptualises student writing as a socially situated discourse practice which is ideologically inscribed (Lea and Street 1998; Jones et al. 1999). Whilst powerful as an oppositional frame, that is...
Student academic writing is at the heart of teaching and learning in higher education. Students are assessed largely by what they write, and need to learn both general academic conventions as well as disciplinary writing requirements in order to be successful in higher education. Teaching Academic Writing is a 'toolkit' designed to help higher educ...
About the book: This reader provides an accessible collection of readings which illustrate both the current variation in research on language and literacy and the common underlying themes. It is made up of twenty chapters, of which eight have been specially commissioned. Together they illustrate some of the ways in which researchers are grappling w...
Student Writing presents an accessible and thought-provoking study of academic writing practices. Informed by 'composition' research from the US and 'academic literacies studies'from the UK, the book challenges current official discourse on writing as a 'skill'. Lillis argues for an approach which sees student writing as social practice. The book d...
In this paper, we focus on the 'problem' of student writing in higher education. We set out to explore this problem from two perspectives: first, from the perspective of 'non-traditional' student-writers as they attempt to engage in academic writing and, second, from the perspective of a cultural-historical tradition of scientific rationality. A co...
The opening up of higher education in Britain to groups previously excluded means that there is currently an opportunity for new voices to be heard in academia. However, the process whereby dominant academic linguistic conventions and practices mediate such voices is highly problematic, tending to constrain rather than open up the possibilities for...
This is actually an entire BOOK, not a chapter. It's available for purchase.
About the book: What distinguishes some texts as 'art'? This book critically examines texts which can be considered 'literary', ranging from poetry, drama and fiction to performance art and online literature. It provides a lively and accessible introduction to stylistic, semiotic and multimodal analysis, drawing on literature, performance and lingu...
Chapter hopes to enable the student to:- - Understand the role of writing as part of the research process - Adapt writing style according to purpose and audience - Know how to revise drafts of a thesis and sharpen their focus and coherence - Elicit and respond effectively to feedback on writing - Structure a thesis coherently - Understand the way i...
Projects
Projects (2)
This longitudinal study of 50 multilingual scholars' practices of writing for publication, focusing mainly on English, began in 2001 and is ongoing, though with more limited data collection since 2009. Theresa Lillis and I have published two books from this project (2010, 2013)and have edited a third (2018). We've also published numerous articles in TESOL Quarterly, Written Communication, AILA Review, English for Specific Purposes, Education Policy Analysis Archives, Publications, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, and other journals, as well as book chapters and shorter pieces.
Aim is to explore the writing of social workers in several UK local authorities, using interviews, observations and both qualitative and corpus linguistic test analysis.