The Institutional Context of ‘Linguistic Injustice’: Norwegian Social Scientists and Situated Multilingualism

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper is well-written and the arguments are clear and well-supported by evidence. It makes a valuable contribution to the literature on EAL scholars writing for publication, by presenting findings from a Norwegian research institute that has a particular research environment and whose EAL researchers have relatively high English proficiency. The most important findings are summarized well in the abstract. But perhaps in various places, beginning and ending in particular, the author may highlight the contributions of the study, perhaps in terms of both findings and theory.  

I understand this is a part of a larger project. The author had 19 informants, including 16 EAL writers; but the data presented in this paper came from some of the EAL writers. It would be good to briefly summarise the personal profiles of the participants mentioned in the paper in a Table in the ‘Materials and Methods’ section. (BTW, why this heading instead of ‘Methods’?) The participants’ (pseudonyms used?) specialization areas, self-identified L1 etc. can be indicated in the Table. It would also be useful to provide a little more info of the data analysis process. In the paper the author makes useful comparisons between the named participants’ perspective and that of the native English-speaking participants at the institute.

I tend to think the finding over ‘situated multilingualism’, while insightful, should have been reported previously in the literature (sorry I can’t recommend any reference at the moment). I wonder if a connection can be made between the finding and relevant literature, even though perhaps the same term may not have been used in the literature. The author may consider adding scare quotes around the term linguistic injustice in the title; it would also be useful to end the paper with an effort to help readers better understand the title, as the title may not be straightforward in meaning to readers. As a minor suggestion, to make the text even more reader-friendly, perhaps the author can consider having sub-sections within the current main sections where appropriate. Finally, it seems the author did not anonymize self-citation(s); maybe that’s not strictly required by the special issue/the journal for the pre-publication stage.  

Author Response

Reviewer 1
(1) Asked for greater clarity with respect to the overall contributions of the study. I have added an extra paragraph to the introduction and two additional sentences in the conclusion that I hope will make the contributions clearer. 
(2) Requested that I make a table of the participants, specifying their areas of specialization, etc. This I do not want to do for ethical reasons: there are only 4 institutes in Norway that could fall under the general description of internationally oriented social science research institutes, and this is already narrowed down to 2 with the description of the overall size. This means people can pretty much guess the institute, which is all the more reason to keep the individuals as anonymous as possible. Linking pseudonyms with areas of specialization and language background will eliminate any hope of anonymity. 
(3) Requested more information about data analysis. I have added a few more sentences about this in the method section.
(4) Wondered about why the section is called "methods and materials", and this is because that is what was included in the template. I prefer "Methods" myself, so I changed it. 
(5) Would like me to connect my concept of "situated multilingualism" with other similar findings. I would love to do this, too, but have not (yet) come across similar findings. The closest was the "truncated multilingualism" (Blommaert), which I have discussed. 
(6) Suggested I add scare quotes around "lingustic injustice" in the title, which I have now done.
(7) Would like me to come back to 'lingustic injustice' at the end, which I have now done. 
(8) Suggested additional sub-sections: this I did not do because I feel that the sections are quite short as they are, and I wasn't convinced it would help the reader navigate the argument any more easily than the current subsections do. 
(9) Wondered about anonymizing self-citations: I am sorry if I misunderstood the process, but there is little point in changing anything now. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Althought the author seems to have aquanted himself quite well with  the existing  literature on the subject I would reccommend that he also looked at the writings of Ingvarsdottir and Arnbjornsdottir on this subject as they support and add to her findings see e.g Writing English for Research and Publication  purposes (ERPP) Chapter 11  in Language across the Life Span. In Arnbjörnsdótir and H. Ingvarsdóttir (Eds) Springer, 2018.

Author Response

Reviewer 2 requested that I refer to a book chapter by Invarsdottir and Arnbjornsdottir. I was able to get a copy of the chapter and it was indeed very relevant. I referred to it several times.