Through imposing institutional pressures of this kind, local universities are competing to gain recognition both domestically and internationally. The number of staff publications as well as the citation indexes of their published articles help play a significant role in determining the reputation of a university.

At a national level, for instance, publication and citation indexes have now become key criteria employed by the government to evaluate and provide grants for a university. The more knowledge is produced (through academic publication) by the teaching staff, the greater the chances of a university being funded, and the more likely it is to be awarded a top label.

In recent years, the international academic publishing industry has seen a surge in the number of non-native English speakers wishing to have their articles published by the industry’s powerhouses, which are dominated by the United States.

Nonetheless, the imperative to write and publish in English poses its own obstacles, as this involves a tight gatekeeping practice. For Indonesian scholars in particular, the problems are indeed multifaceted and convoluted. However, local scholars’ lack of linguistic proficiency seems to have constituted a major barrier.

This is because English academic writing is a highly specific discipline that needs to be acquired through years of schooling rather than through intensive spoken interaction with native speakers of English.

It is due to this linguistic impediment that the presence of literacy brokers is badly called for. They are usually professional and well-trained academics (either native or non-native speakers of English) who provide linguistic support as proofreaders and translators to those who need their services.

Quite interestingly, concomitant with the government’s publish-or-perish policy, language brokers — the majority of whom are local professionals — are mushrooming, offering their services to novice researchers and scholar writers who are under pressure to publish in international fora. They are now in high demand.

As local academics are struggling with their linguistic inadequacy, which hampers their academic writing practices, literacy brokers are needed to assist them to attain linguistic equity. It is not uncommon to find their submitted articles turned down by journal editors due to language-related problems.

More than that, literacy brokers are much sought after, with the belief that by virtue of their publishing experience they are able to help even senior researchers get their work published in prestigious international journals.

While their hopes are high after being trained by literacy brokers, the number of local scholars’ publications is still far below that of other countries which do not have English as an official language, such as Vietnam and Thailand.

Clearly, the attainment of linguistic equity is only one criterion for successful publishing practices. The prowess to adjust oneself to established academic writing conventions, the dexterity to satisfy the academic community’s expectations, the willingness to keep abreast with new insights from scholarly literature and the ability to frame well-designed research are certainly other determining factors worth considering.

A colleague of mine wondered why, after participating in many academic writing workshops given by a local literacy broker, she still found it difficult to write in an academic register, let alone publish her work in an international journal.

Her main problem, as it turned out, was not that she lacked creative ideas to pen into a scholarly article, but rather she was unfamiliar with the expected texture of academic prose. In other words, she had not yet developed full control of the established conventions of academic writing.

While international publishing industries now acknowledge and value the heterogeneity of voices international scholars bring with them in the process of knowledge production, literacy brokers should aim not solely to help local academics attain linguistic equity and unleash them from language stigmatization perpetuated by the journals’ gatekeepers. Neither should they simply help develop an awareness of the established rhetorical convention of academic writing practices.

The global recognition of multilingualism in the academic publishing industry clearly suggests that efforts to gain acceptance for international publications go beyond the attainment of linguistic equity as well as the conformity to rigid conventions.

Academic writing practices are not an autonomous or monolithic entity. With the increasing numbers of multilingual scholars successfully publishing in the mainstream journals dominated by the Western countries, these practices are beginning to be inclusive and egalitarian, acknowledging the reality that knowledge production is a practice that is shaped by multilingual scholars’ linguistic, social, ideological, political and cultural backgrounds.

It is this orientation that local literacy brokers miss, or probably ignore, in their painstaking efforts to help local academics to publish.

And perhaps it is this missing factor that contributes to the pervasive perception among local scholars that non-native English writers like them are often stigmatized in terms of academic language proficiency whenever they attempt to publish their articles in mainstream academic journals.

Rather than merely exhort local academics to one-sidedly comply with the existing conventions, literacy brokers should help craft their texts and negotiate possible textual tensions that might occur by virtue of the writers’ rhetorical tradition and cultural values. In doing so, they implant in them a critical attitude that respects the importance of retaining one’s own voices and authorial self in knowledge production.

***

The writer teaches at the graduate school of Applied English Linguistics, Faculty of Education and Language, Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta. He can be reached at setiono.sugiharto@gmail.com.

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