Theme
Although ISLS is an international society, which holds its annual conferences in countries around the world, there are very few international or non-native English-speaking scholars published in ISLS journals. There are several reasons for why this situation has persisted. First, relative to the membership, there are comparatively few manuscripts submitted from regions in which English is not the academic language. Second, the manuscripts that are submitted from these regions often do not follow the norms and standards of high quality academic writing that are required to ben published in ISLS journals. Third, in many cases, we know that scholars in these regions do not have access to mentors and research environments that can support their writing.
A powerful technique used by English as a Second Language (ESL) adults learning to improve their writing is collaborative writing (Storch, 2005). Those working in pairs produced texts that were more concise, had fewer grammatical errors, and better matched the task goals. Several processes in the collaboration contributed to this, including more frequent and useful feedback by their writing partner and the opportunity to pool relevant ideas together to improve the document.