Publishing in and about English: challenges and opportunities of Chinese multilingual scholars' language practices in academic publishing

This paper reports on a qualitative inquiry into Chinese multilingual scholars' language practices in academic publishing as the Chinese government develops higher education competitiveness and expands multilingual foreign language education. Fifteen Chinese multilingual scholars from five non-English language divisions were interviewed. Bourdieu's linguistic market theory was adopted as the guiding framework to understand the scholars' multilingual practices in academic publishing. The findings suggest that institutional research assessment based on key index lists functioned as a market unification mechanism that devalued the scholars' multilingual capital. Meanwhile, the implicit language policy of publishing in and about English perpetuated and reproduced structural inequality in the international and national academic publishing marketplace. Despite this perceived disadvantaged position, the scholars generated new language practices to counteract the structural constraints. In light of these findings, policy makers should be aware of the implicit language policies in index-based research assessment exercises, and should take into consideration the specific circumstances of different language majors when developing research assessment policies. Measures are suggested to empower multilingual scholars with capacities to participate equally in knowledge construction, regardless of the languages that they work with.