Recently, several colleagues in China talked to me about publishing academic papers in English. I want to use this place to talk about my experience and views. Scholars of domestic linguistics and applied linguistics tend to publish articles in Chinese in China, mainly because, first, the school requires teachers and graduate students to publish articles in core journals; Secondly, English is not the mother tongue after all, and the time spent writing an English article can be used to write several Chinese articles. It is understandable that the national conditions are so. Recently, however, some colleagues complained that most domestic journals like articles on quantitative research, but they are not so welcome to articles on qualitative research (such as ethnographic research and action research). I don't have much experience in publishing academic papers in Chinese. I wonder if the inside story of domestic academic papers is like this.

Writing academic articles and attending academic conferences is actually a kind of dialogue between peers in academic circles. Write in Chinese. Colleagues who know Chinese can read your research. Good. Just write it in English, and colleagues who know English can read it. If you want to share your research with colleagues all over the world, maybe English can achieve this goal. In the past few years, I have published some English papers and been invited by some English academic journals (TESOL Quarterly, Journal of Second Language Writing, Journal of Language Learning and Technology, World Englishes) to comment on them. According to my experience, I want to talk about some points that should be paid attention to when publishing articles in English journals of applied linguistics. This kind of experience is for the reference of interested colleagues, so as to promote our international academic exchange level.

First of all, the purpose of the paper review is not only to find out what has been discussed/studied in this field at present, but also to criticize the existing research, so as to find out the problems worthy of further study. I find the next step the hardest. It was not easy for me to do it when I was a student, and it is not easy for doctoral students to do it now. Many of the contributions I commented on failed to do this.

Secondly, based on the summary of the paper, the research problems and research schemes are put forward. The proposal of problems and schemes must be based on the criticism of previous studies (including content and methods). I often find that the summary of many papers is out of touch with the following research questions and research plans.

Thirdly, the process of material collection and analysis must be described in detail. Whether it is qualitative analysis or quantitative analysis, you should first put forward several aspects you want to observe/study on the basis of the summary of the paper, and then describe your measurement method or analysis method in detail.

Fourthly, analyze the materials one by one according to several aspects I want to observe. In the process of analysis, we can compare and discuss the research published by predecessors, and understand or explain our new findings by comparing and quoting others' existing findings. In the part of material analysis and discussion, the research questions put forward in front of the article must be tightly buckled, so as to highlight the contribution of this study and reflect the spirit of academic exchange.

Having said that, some people may say that these points are different from the requirements of China's academic papers. In fact, these are the most basic requirements of academic articles, so it seems that the domestic academic paper norms have been in line with international standards. Finally, some requirements that may be different from many domestic academic journals of liberal arts are mentioned.

Fifth, the article may need to be revised before submission. English journals are generally edited and screened first, and articles with research content and writing style suitable for this journal are sent to colleagues in two or three fields for anonymous review. Generally speaking, it is very unlikely that the article will hit the target at once. In many cases, the editor will synthesize the opinions of the reviewers of the article and let the author revise one by one according to the reviewers' suggestions (often commenting on the above points) before voting. This is really good news, because both editors and reviewers think that the research is well done, and the content and writing style of the paper are basically in line with the tradition of the journal. The author should revise the article according to his own opinion before submitting it. It is common to modify one or two rounds like this. Don't give up.

Sixth, revise it repeatedly to improve the logic and accuracy of the paper. In the process of writing a paper, it needs to be revised several times, and it is necessary to repeatedly think about the possible quality difficulties of demanding readers. Before sending it to the journal editorial department, make sure one or two of your colleagues? Ruthless? Seriously criticize and ensure that there are no major problems in logic and language expression. The first English paper I published has been revised no less than ten times! I dare not relax in this respect now.