Incubating a scholarly writer: Academic socialization of an MA student through writing for international publication

Although writing for publication has been recognized to be beneficial for students' learning of disciplinary writing and integration into academic communities, documentation and examination of their developmental process during the publishing practice are still few. Little is known about how novices learn and grow as emerging scholarly writers in the process of producing a publishable text. Informed by the language socialization theory, this paper reports the findings of a case study of a master's student's first international publishing experience at a university in a non-English dominant context, China. Multiple types of narrative and textual data were collected. The findings suggest that the changing conceptualization of “publishability” impacts the student's writing in significant ways. Specifically, the study shows how the student's prior socialization experiences and the sociopolitical force of publication intertwined with multifaceted academic interactions led to her increased understanding about some cultural knowledge behind “publishability”. The study provides useful implications for research and practice in academic writing for publication.