Attitudes of Journal Editors to Nonnative Speaker Contributions

More and more nonnative speakers (NNSs) are seeking to publish in international journals devoted to English language teaching and applied linguistics. Strong anecdotal evidence and occasional references in the literature attest to the disadvantages NNSs encounter vis-a-vis their native speaker (NS) peers. This article presents the results of an interview study with the editors of 12 leading international journals in applied linguistics and English language teaching. The purpose was to find out how these editors viewed the issue of NNSs publishing in their journals and to gain insight into how to enhance the chances of successful publication by NNSs. The results of the interviews included a questioning of the concept of the term nonnative speaker, the overall attitudes of editors and reviewers to NNS contributions, problematic aspects of NNS contributions, and positive attributes of NNS contributors. Problematic aspects included surface errors, parochialism, absence of authorial voice, and nativized varieties of English. Positive attributes include awareness of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural issues, objectivity of outsider perspectives, an international perspective, a testing mechanism for the dominant theories of the centre, access to research sites and data where NSs would be intrusive, and the alerting of centre scholars to research undertaken on the periphery.