Experiences of publishing in English: Vietnamese doctoral students' challenges and strategies

Publishing research articles in English-medium refereed journals is a challenging task for non-native English speaking (NNES) doctoral students. Limited research, however, has been conducted in the Australian context to explore publishing experiences of NNES doctoral students. Adopting a qualitative research approach with semi-structured interviews to collect data, this research investigates language-related challenges encountered by seven Vietnamese students studying doctoral programs in Australian universities and their strategies to successfully publish their research articles in English. Content analysis was adopted for data analysis and an inductive approach was used to identify themes that emerged from the data. The results show that as non-native English speakers, these Vietnamese doctoral students had difficulties in using their discipline-specific terminology, expressing ideas in English and developing ideas logically. They also had to handle paper rejection and negative comments on their language issues given by journal gatekeepers. As novice scholarly writers, they encountered additional challenges because of their insufficient knowledge of and practice in writing research articles. To get their papers published, they have developed necessary strategies such as co-authoring with supervisors, seeking linguistic assistance from native speakers, self-proofreading, and developing genre knowledge of research articles. This research project has important implications for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs and supportive writing programs that aim to help increase the publication outputs of NNES doctoral students in Australian universities. Future research may examine the publishing experiences of NNES doctoral students on a larger scale that allows comparisons between different linguistic groups as well as generalisation of the results to a wider population.