“You don’t say what you know, only what you can”: The perceptions and practices of senior Spanish academics regarding research dissemination in English

This paper is a contribution to an expanding literature on the challenges non-Anglophone academics confront in disseminating their research in English, the dominant language of international scientific communication. Drawing on a corpus of interviews with senior Spanish academics, who remain a relatively little researched academic community compared to many others, we focus on the English language publishing/dissemination practices of our subjects, on their attitudes to the dominance of English, on their perceptions of the most problematic aspects of writing in English, and on their views as to how they might best be supported by their university with regard to their English language needs. The overall aim is to better understand how these academics cope with the challenge of disseminating research in English with a view to formulating the most realistic and most appropriate interventions to support them. Salient among our findings is that subjects report a particular sense of disadvantage in relation to spoken communication at conferences, more so than for academic writing. This, therefore, is a potentially fruitful area for supportive intervention along with others discussed in the conclusion to the paper.