Challenges of Academic Writing in a Second Language: Data Commentaries in Focus

In the broad context of academic writing and publishing, the hegemony of English is now an accomplished fact (Galloway & Rose, 2015; Gentil & Seror, 2014). This motivates Anglophone and non- Anglophone researchers to adhere to benchmarked native standards of English if they seek publishing to acquire academic prestige. In this regard, non-Anglophone researchers might find writing in pristine English a barrier to publication as their manuscripts might be frequently rejected for language inadequacies. In this talk, I first compare Data Commentary, language that accompanies pictorial presentations, with the results section of a research article, as an adjacent genre, that reports and comments on the obtained results. Then I, particularly, draw on phrasal complexity features and introduce some data that indicate how similar/different these two academic writings are to/from one another. I expect the findings obtained from this study to give fresh insights into the needs of novice academic writers for developing a publishable text