METM25 presentation

Many hats: expanding repertoires in academic communication

Academics wear many hats and must navigate a wide range of communicative situations, including challenging multilingual contexts.

Academic communication entails more than writing for journals and presenting at conferences. Although this observation is not new, academic literacy teaching continues to focus on writing research articles, largely overlooking other types of communication. Initiatives such as the Open University’s PACE programme seek to broaden the scope, supporting researchers in “becoming confident and engaging communicators”. Such approaches recognize that researchers must master the conventions for communicating with peers, patrons, and the public in various settings and a growing number of genres. But researchers’ career success will also hinge on their proficiency in other genres, such as writing a CV or a funding proposal. This makes heavy demands on multilingual researchers’ language skills, and this is where language professionals come in.

Fostering early-career researchers’ academic communication is central to my role at the Graduate School where I teach: we aim to help PhD candidates develop the skills they need for their later career. My courses address not only writing research articles but also networking at conferences, presenting to multidisciplinary audiences, compiling an academic CV, and writing an accompanying cover letter.

In my presentation, I will give examples from these courses – showing how we can support multilingual academics’ communication in a range of registers, styles, and genres – before inviting the audience to share their own experiences. The aim is to exchange best practices and raise awareness of language professionals’ roles on the fringes of academic English. In this way, we can enhance the support we offer to multilingual academics and expand our own repertoire.

The presentation is for language professionals who teach English for research purposes, as well as editors and translators who work closely with academic authors.
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About the presenter 

Maria Sherwood-Smith lectures in academic English at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of Leiden University, the Netherlands, where she gives courses for early-career researchers on various aspects of academic communication and participation.