Writing scientific English: overcoming intercultural problems

“Publish in English or perish!” has become a slogan frequently heard in non-English-speaking academic contexts all over the world. For many nations, proficiency in spoken and written English has become a must. But achieving such proficiency involves problems and hard work. This paper discusses some of the intercultural problems of writing academic English in a non-English context, namely in Finland. A further issue addressed in this paper is the training of language teachers to teach writing courses in academic English in such a context. It is argued that before such courses are designed for academic non-native writers and for teachers of such writers, it is essential to conduct textlinguistic research into the cultural and linguistic differences in writing practices which exist between the source and target languages. As will be shown, such textlinguistic research gives us vital information on cohesion and coherence problems that non-native writers of English have in areas such as thematic patternings, reference and connectors. The results show that for linguists, as well as for teachers and writers, textlinguistics offers convenient tools for analysing, understanding, and correcting intercultural linguistic problems in writing. Furthermore, the results of the analyses feed directly into the design of academic writing courses in English for non-native writers and into the training of teachers for such courses.