Academic Writing in a Second or Foreign Language. Issues and Challenges Facing ESL/EFL Academic Writers in Higher Education Contexts

One of the social domains that seems to have become truly international is academia: researchers exchange ideas and collaborate with colleagues across national borders and continents. They do so either face-to-face at conferences, through collaborative research projects, or at a distance on the basis of technologies that allow instantaneous communication; English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) apparently facilitates this global exchange and, as the language of Science, dominates the majority of so-called ‘international’ peer-reviewed journals. Universities increasingly promote themselves as ‘international ’ in order to attract students from a variety of countries to their degree programmes imparted in English