Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

138 Language Planning and Education
to third world scientists publishing their work, the barriers of language are not
formidable:
From the data here the linguistic barriers for NNS’s [non-native speakers] to be
published in even the most prestigious journal do not seem high. 13
Of course, Wood’s sample is limited, and it would require replication over a wider
range of journals to convince one that non-native researchers are not disadvantaged
in gaining access to international publication. Nonetheless, his findings provide
grounds for suspending an automatic assumption of disadvantage.
If one turns to the different matter of perceptions of disadvantage, the evidence
again is mixed. Tardy (2004) cites a number of authors who have found that
non-native scholars do feel disadvantaged with respect to native English-speaking
academics, yet the findings of her own survey of international graduate students’
attitudes are more qualified. All questionnaire respondents (N=45) believed there
were beneficial aspects to the use of English as an international language of science,
but at the same time thirty-six of these same respondents identified disadvantageous
aspects – the time needed to learn English to a high level, for example.
A similar qualified picture emerges from a survey of Swiss researchers’ attitudes
(n=250) to English in science, carried out by Murray and Dingwall (2001: 100). In
the survey 41 per cent of respondents indicated that they thought the dominance of
English was a slight disadvantage in their careers and 8 per cent thought it a major
handicap, but 27 per cent believed it was actually a slight advantage with a further
24 per cent seeing it as having no effect either way. These findings are not dissimilar
to Ammon’s 1990 survey of German scientists’ attitudes, where 55 per cent of the
sample reported no sense of disadvantage in their ability to communicate in English.
They contrast sharply, however, with Truchot (2001: 320), whose 1984 Strasbourg
survey found that as many as 60 per cent of the French scientists in the sample
considered themselves to be significantly disadvantaged relative to native Englishspeaking
scientists.
Drawing any definitive conclusion from these various survey findings is, of course,
very difficult. The questions and samples are very different, and the responses are
clearly influenced by perceptions of who the respondents believe themselves to be in
competition with, and by how good they believe their own English to be. Then there
is the influence of national background: Swiss researchers from a relatively small and
officially multilingual country may be more easily reconciled to the use of English
to transcend the national science community than, say, French scientists, whose
language has been in competition with English as an international language and
whose government has enacted legislation (1994) to defend the use of French in
scientific and academic domains.
What one can say, however, is that there is evidence of ambivalent attitudes
towards the dominance of English, and that there is, as one would expect on a priori
grounds, a widespread, though far from universal, sense that non-native researchers
are indeed disadvantaged relative to native English-speaking scientists when it comes
to international scientific communication.