English for research publication purposes: The case of scholarly peer review comments

Abstract

This study was an attempt to investigate the English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) needs of Iranian non-native speakers of English (NNSE) researchers. To this end, a questionnaire, semi-structured interview, and a corpus of the referees’ comments were used. The corpus comprised 621 comments drawn from 78 reviews on 45 full-length manuscripts from three broad disciplinary groups, i.e. engineering, science, and humanities. The results of corpus analysis suggest that, regardless of discipline, Iranian NNSE researchers, as off-network researchers, seem to have more problems with the use of language than with technical contents when writing a scientific manuscript. Moreover, the results of corpus analysis show that coping with syntactic and lexical use of English was much more problematic than discourse and rhetoric. Whereas science researchers believed in the primacy of lexis and syntax over discourse and rhetoric due to the existence of some definite moves in their papers, humanities researchers stressed the significance of knowing the moves of different sections of an article. The paper ends with some pedagogical implications for different disciplinary groups