Preparing Chinese graduate students of science facing an international publication requirement for graduation: Adapting an intensive workshop approach for early-candidature use

As it becomes increasingly important for graduate students worldwide to write about their research in English for international publication, interest is growing in designing preparatory and support courses that effectively introduce the challenges and provide scaffolded practice, while fitting within context-specific constraints, including stage of candidature, level of student motivation, discipline/major mix and course length. Here we present a workshop approach shown to be successful with advanced graduate students actually writing papers, and a series of adaptations designed to make it suitable for graduate students still undertaking preparatory coursework prior to commencing their research projects. A 16 h adapted version was trialled in central China in 2016. Responding to recommendations in the literature, half the course hours were devoted to demystifying the task of article writing, including identifying take-home messages from data, selecting target journals, and writing to meet the criteria of editors and referees. Our decision to devote the remaining course hours to strategies for developing discipline-specific English skills proved congruent with students' pre-course perceptions of their major challenges. Outcomes included strong student engagement with course tasks, enhanced awareness of the links between English learning and the design, conduct and reporting of scientific research, and increased student confidence to write a paper for international submission. The context-specific adaptation process discussed provides an approach that could be useful in other contexts where instruction in writing for publication is needed.