English or Spanish for Research Publication Purposes? Reflections on a critical pragmatic pedagogy

Abstract

Spanish academics working in the natural sciences and social sciences have for many years found it essential to publish in English if research recognition and professional promotion are to be obtained. More recently, scholars in fields such as History of Art and Literary Studies are also experiencing increasing pressure to publish in English even though their main language of publication may still be Spanish. In this chapter, we review a course designed and implemented at the University of La Laguna (Spain) to support PhD students writing in these disciplines. In designing the course we adopted a critical-pragmatic perspective, adapting similar corpus-based, genre-analytic programmes we had run in Health Care Sciences and Psychology research for publication purposes courses. We discuss the appropriateness of adopting such an approach to the training of bilingual novice writers working in the arts and humanities.