Research that’s relevant to wordface practitioners

Ian Williams, organizer – University of Cantabria, Spain

Research carried our on academic and professional writing and translation can often appear remote from the day-to-day practice of those involved in producing or helping to produce texts for publication in these settings. Furthermore, this research is dispersed in a wide range of journals in disciplines that do not always read each other’s work. This panel will explore and attempt to identify the kind of research that is useful to the practitioner and can influence the way they approach their work.

• Hot topics in current research – John Swales, University of Michigan

• Implications of ‘social practice’ writing research for supporting writing for publication – Theresa Lillis, UK

  Theresa Lillis will provide 2 specific examples of how findings from ethnographic research on academic writing may be useful for professionals concerned with supporting multilingual scholars: the first relates to training and materials development; the second relates to working with journal editorial boards.

• Guidelines for manuscript preparation – help or hindrance? – Karen Shashok, Spain

  Karen Shashok will look at how research on the instructions to authors can help to explain why practitioners are getting so many problematic texts to deal with.

• What researchers can learn from biomedical editors’ efforts to make research more usable for practitioners – Mary Ellen Kerans, Spain

  Biomedical editors have long been concerned about the links that ought to exist – but often don’t – between research findings and medical practice. In the process of author’s editing and translation, I’ve watched up close and at a distance to see how editors of all levels of journals make efforts to bridge the knowledge-practice gap. Some have adopted simple, useful editorial measures to guide practitioners’ reading or to entice new readers and writers to a journal. Researchers and journal editors in education, applied linguistics, translation studies and ‘editology’ might be interested in taking on some of those practices.

• Corpus-based research and contrastive analysis: How relevant is it to practitioners? – Ian A. Williams, Spain

  Using my background of both translator and researcher, I will comment on the kind of corpus-based and/or contrastive research that I find most useful, illustrating my contribution with reference to recent research into the use of the first-person in cross-disciplinary and contrastive settings.