“We’re drifting into strange territory here”: What think-aloud protocols reveal about convenience editing

•We had English teachers edit scientific abstracts following a think-aloud protocol.•Participants’ comments mainly concerned word choice and content matters.•Participants experienced much uncertainty while editing the abstracts.•Participants made tentative revisions and needed to consult the abstracts’ authors.•Authors’ involvement with English teachers in the editing process is essential.

English as an additional language (EAL) researchers in scientific fields, anxious about the language quality of their English-language manuscripts, may consult English-teaching colleagues without scientific backgrounds or training in editing (Burrough-Boenisch, 2003). However, the editing of scientific texts can involve much stress and uncertainty to English teachers (Willey and Tanimoto, 2012 and Willey and Tanimoto, 2013). This study examined English teachers’ concerns in the act of editing, and the strategies they employed when grappling with uncertainty. Five English teachers at Japanese universities with regular editing experience edited two English abstracts, written by Japanese researchers in scientific fields, while audio-recording their thoughts. Post-task interviews were conducted to clarify findings. The three most common concerns identified in think-aloud transcripts were, in order of frequency, non-technical word usage, content/meaning issues, and technical term usage. Participants’ strategies for dealing with uncertainty were to indicate a need to consult the author, make a tentative revision, take no action at all, conduct a search for information, and to delay revision. These results suggest that authors’ involvement in the editing process is essential when English teachers edit scientific manuscripts. Implications for theory development and pedagogy in the field of second language writing are presented and discussed.