In this post two of our authors, Chika Takahashi and Daniel O. Jackson, reflect on their experience of having their first books published and offer advice to those hoping to do the same.
Less than a decade ago, we finished our dissertations and started new lives as professors, which eventually led us to write our first single-authored books. For the benefit of colleagues on similar journeys, we wanted to share our reflections on the experience, and also note the exciting, new directions in which this process has taken us.
Our paths have converged and diverged along the way to this career milestone. Both of us graduated from the same department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (we had different advisors), we teach at universities in Japan (one public, the other private), and we specialize in the psychology of language learning and teaching (PLLT). Our books in Multilingual Matters’ PLLT series extend our doctoral experiences in unique ways.
Chika: As for my volume, it is a direct extension of my dissertation study that ended up lasting nine years in total. Of course, at the time of working on my dissertation, my main goal was to finish the study and earn the degree. However, the interviews in my study were so interesting that I simply wanted to find out what happened to my interviewees after the dissertation study ended. Furthermore, my advisor, JD Brown, once said when discussing my proposal, “it’s only your dissertation.” At the time I didn’t really get what he meant, but now I understand it very well in that the dissertation is only the beginning of a career as a researcher. The topics covered in my book developed to include those that were not in the original design, which is mainly thanks to my interviewees’ contrasting and wonderful multiple language learning experiences, but the original big question of how language learning motivation changes has remained the same.
Daniel: The topic of my book, language teacher noticing, was not mentioned in my dissertation on individual differences in language learning, although the book clearly shows the influence of my earlier research. Much of my writing displays a passion for defining and measuring psychological constructs and all of it concerns language learning and teaching. The book, however, grew directly out of my work educating preservice teachers in Japan, which started with my current position. It is more grounded in this context and clearer in its practical implications. That said, in writing my book, I drew inspiration from my doctoral studies and my advisor, Dick Schmidt, who had extensively researched noticing by learners. My book builds on his contribution, and that of others, to make a case for teacher noticing. Given its overarching goal of offering an integrative perspective on noticing, I think it fits well within the PLLT series.
As noted, dissertations are only a beginning. They are a foundation for one’s academic identity, but they do not determine the future. As we moved forward, we both asked and sought answers to big picture questions (as in our dissertations) within particular contexts of language learning and teaching. It was our choice to follow our scholarship to new places and an exciting challenge to situate our work among recent views in applied linguistics. From our perspective, the emergence of the PLLT field marks a shift toward holistically and humanistically examining “what goes right” in language learning and teaching, rather than “what goes wrong”. This is a refreshing and much-needed change amid the uncertainty and distress that have prevailed in recent years.
Though the writing process differs for everyone, we’d like to conclude with some tips we both found useful:
Build a network of close colleagues and family or friends who will support you.
Check the materials available online, including the Multilingual Matters editors’ discussions with book series editors on their excellent YouTube channel.
Understand your proposed book’s unique appeal and its audience.
Don’t be afraid even if you’re a first-time author. If you believe in the value of your book, go for it!
If your proposal is accepted, set a realistic delivery date to submit the manuscript.
Be aware of the author guidelines as you prepare your work for submission.
After the external review, make necessary changes and prepare a response file to send with your revised manuscript.
Know that the publisher and series editors want you to succeed!
You can find Chika’s book, Motivation to Learn Multiple Languages in Japan, here and Daniel’s book, Language Teacher Noticing in Tasks, here.
You can learn more about how to put a book together in this discussion with our series editors and authors here.
If you would like to submit a book proposal, you can do so here. We look forward to hearing from you!
In this post Tommi explains our collaboration with DeGruyter and their Publisher Partner Program.
Independence
Anyone who knows Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters will know how fiercely proud we are of our independence. We are not owned by a corporation, neither are we controlled by a university. We do not even owe significant sums of money to banks or financial institutions. This gives us the freedom to publish the books we believe in, and to pursue projects and ideas that we think are good and bring value to the community.
So why, when you search for our books on Google, do you often see books published by us on our rival publisher DeGruyter’s website?
Don’t worry – we have not been bought or taken over by DeGruyter! We remain the same, proudly independent business that we have always been, with total control over our publishing and our finances.
Publisher Partner Program
The DeGruyter Publisher Partner Program started in 2012 with Harvard University Press, and has since expanded to include 34 presses of various sizes, some of which are independent, others are university presses.
At Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters we have been including our books in the Publisher Partner Program since 2018, and it has allowed us to reach institutional markets that we would never be able to reach on our own. The team at DeGruyter have good contacts with libraries and library consortia worldwide, and act on our behalf to promote relevant titles and collections of titles to these groups. When combining with other quality presses, we are able to put together strong collections of monographs in key subject areas, which are large enough to draw the attention of library collection development teams – and yet retain the highest editorial qualities and diverse publishing lists typical of strong independent publishers and the university presses alike.
We have seen very strong take up of our titles through the DeGruyter program, and we have worked closely together with DeGruyter, with librarians and with authors to raise awareness of our linguistics collection and of our tourism studies books, increasing accessibility of our materials in a number of campuses worldwide. Watch this space for details of future webinars to further promote these collections!
Open Access
As well as working with us to sell books, the DeGruyter partner program allows us to publish our Open Access materials – whether these are full titles or just single chapters within edited titles on their platform – helping to further the availability of these titles along with our traditionally published volumes.
Competition?
But are we not worried about DeGruyter as a competitor? One of our fears when joining the partner program was that we would lose quality manuscripts and proposals to DeGruyter. We are now four years into our partnership and we have yet to see any evidence that this would be the case. Many of our authors have also published books with DeGruyter, and we have the greatest respect for their editorial team – if they did not have a strong linguistics list it would not have made sense for us to partner with them. But our individual lists are different as we have strengths in slightly different areas. We see that many authors will choose the appropriate publisher depending on the focus of their project, just as they always have done.
We look forward to a continued strong working relationship with DeGruyter in years to come, as much as we look forward to many more years of proud independence!
Nowadays, when publishing is easier than ever, why do you need a publisher? Why not just put your manuscript online, especially if it is Open Access (OA)? In this blog post, our Managing Director Tommi Grover shares the views of an independent international publisher. He brings out how diverse the professional expertise – from editorial, administrative and production to marketing and sales – required to publish a book are. He also looks at the costs of publishing in both open access and traditional publishing.
Publishing has never been easier and more accessible to all. There is very little to stop you from taking your own manuscript, putting it through a simple desktop publishing program, and publishing it online. Many platforms will even walk you through the process of producing a printed version that you can make available for sale.
So why do publishing companies still exist and thrive? How is it fair that we charge universities to buy books that come from publicly funded research?
What you are paying for is a range of professional expertise
Editorial expertise
L-R: Sarah, Tommi, Elinor, Laura, Anna, Flo and Rose
Initially, you are getting the expertise of our editorial staff. Whether it’s Anna, Laura, Sarah or Rosie that you are dealing with, they will spend several years working with first your ideas, then your book proposal, and eventually your draft and final manuscripts. They will commission reviews from your academic colleagues – we are the first to acknowledge that these review payments are little more than a token of appreciation rather than a full remuneration for the time spent. They will discuss and approve the final manuscript with academic series editors – we pay for their expertise too. Anna, Laura, Sarah and Rosie will not allow your manuscript to go into production until they are satisfied that it is as good as it can be. We do not get paid more when a manuscript is delayed, but a scrupulous academic publisher would never rush a book through in order to get paid. Future readers of your book know that your book has been carefully reviewed and edited, and that our imprint can be trusted for quality publications in your field of knowledge.
Administrative expertise
Throughout this process and further, Rose will be keeping everything on track. She makes sure that your project is where it should be, with the appropriate documentation, permissions, manuscript and graphics files, author questionnaires and contracts. She makes sure that an ISBN is registered for each version of the book – without which sales will be difficult.
Production expertise
Sarah then takes over to see the book through its production processes. She will engage the services of freelance copyeditors and typesetters like Ralph or Mythili, and will personally look over every page of your manuscript looking for errors and corrections that need to be made. Sarah will liaise with the appropriate printer for the type of book, whether that is a digital printer or an offset printer, Sarah will know what is appropriate for each project.
Sarah will work with Flo in our marketing department who will choose an appropriate cover image and cover design created by our freelance partners Latte, Dave or Julie. You might ask why a cover design is still important in an ebook or open access world? If you want your work to be noticed and read, you cannot rely on citations alone – a cover that will get your book noticed, whether it is on a webpage, blog post, conference stand or bookshop shelf, is one of the first steps to being seen. If the cover looks shoddy, what does that say about the likely content?
Marketing expertise
Well before the beautiful book has been realised, Elinor will already be working on the marketing plan to ensure that the title information is fed out to all of our distribution and sales partners, and that metadata is kept accurate and complete. Elinor and Flo will produce PDF catalogues and keep our website running so that the books can be found in all the venues you might expect to find them. Elinor and Flo will negotiate with organisations who might ask for sponsorship funds to help them deliver a world class conference, and to arrange opportunities for your work to be seen by delegates. During COVID when there were no conference opportunities, they immediately started working on organising our own seminars, webinars, and online discussion forums so that authors would not lose out on opportunities to promote their work. They will work on social media campaigns for your book, and they will aim to promote your research in general, regardless of whether this might directly lead to a sale.
Sales expertise
Laura will oversee the distribution of your book, and ensure that there are always copies in the warehouse ready for sale, and that our sales reps and booksellers, whether they are in London, Tokyo, Cape Town, Islamabad, New York or Sydney are aware of our books and know how to get hold of them. Over the years we have developed a wide network of contacts who all work together to get your book to end users around the world. We’ll work with our library ebook partners DeGruyter, ProQuest and EBSCO among others, and with Zenodo and DeGruyter to deliver our open access publications.
Rights and permissions
Laura will also work with many international publishers who might express an interest in publishing your work in a language other than English. She’ll ensure that the translation rights are paid for and that you receive a copy of the book in every language that it’s published in. With open access materials it is important to know the implications of what license you are publishing the work under. We can help you with questions about what you allow other people to do with your work. It is your work, and you should always have a say in what can be done with it.
Backroom infrastructure
And behind all of these actions there is an infrastructure that needs paying for: an office building that needs heat, light and communications; authors’ and series editors’ royalties to be paid; and systems to be maintained so that we know what stage any project is at.
What are the real costs?
Plant costs
The typesetting, printing, cover design and direct costs relating to a book are easy to quantify. Typesetting is dependent on page extent and complexity, but most of our books can be professionally typeset for somewhere between about £800 and £3000. Cover designs often cost between £125 and £250 for a reasonably simple design, but can be more if the design needs to be unique. If you search online picture libraries you’ll be able to see that the cost of images varies dramatically by image, especially if you want the exclusive rights to it to ensure that two competing books don’t get the same book cover!
Print costs
Print costs used to be complicated but with digital printing even very short runs of books are now viable so whilst the printed product is the most tangible evidence of a process that costs money, those costs are nowadays negligible when compared with the staff time involved.
Distribution costs
Distribution costs are paid by way of percentage discounts and fees – whether print or library format ebooks, we pay a percentage of our income to the intermediaries.
Open access vs traditional costs
Open access publications do not need to pay the same distribution or print costs, but do require the same investment in typesetting and design, and a responsible open access publisher will spend at least as much on the editorial process – we do not distinguish between OA and traditional model in our editorial process.
Authors and editors payments
With the traditional model of publishing we pay our authors a royalty. This usually starts at 4% for the early copies of an academic monograph, doubling to 8% when the book will have broken even. If we know that an author has a track record of very strong sales, we’ll pay a higher royalty, and for textbooks we usually pay 12%. Authors are paid 50% of any income for subsidiary rights such as translations. We pay our series editors 4–5% of all sales income for their expertise. For an open access book we would pay the series editor a fee.
Editorial costs
All of our staff are based in the UK, and we pay them a fair salary. We’ve always believed that treating our staff well means that we recruit and retain great employees, so if you’ve published with us in the past 15-20 years, it’s likely that you’ll have dealt with the same people for all of that time. Allocating these costs to an individual title fairly is difficult. You could allocate by time, complexity, average cost, share of income for example. There isn’t a single “right” method!
Profit!
So what happens to the profit? When we make a profit on an individual title, most of this money is put back into publishing future books. The company is owned by my family, and my colleagues, and we all believe in the books we are publishing. We are not running a charity, so when we are able to, we distribute small amounts of this profit to our shareholders. But neither do we have the backing of a large university so each profitable book secures future publications that little bit more. To give you a sense of scale, I can say that we pay approximately £90,000 each year in royalties to authors, whereas in the past decade we have only paid £5000 to shareholders in dividends. This is as it should be – we earn a fair salary for the work we do, and profits are only paid out when really do have surplus.
In summary
We treat each book project individually. Whether you publish with us the traditional way where we pay for everything up front, and recoup the costs from book sales, or whether it’s an open access publication where we require payment for our services on publication of the title, we will make sure that we price your book fairly, based on the size and complexity of the work. When we receive OA funding for a chapter in a book, we’ll reduce the selling price of both the library ebook version and the printed book to reflect that some of the material is available open access. For example our title Pedagogical Translanguaging edited by Päivi Juvonen and Marie Källkvist had four out of 12 chapters published open access – and so we reduced the selling price of all the editions substantially. We have to continue to be viable, so we are evolving these policies as we get more experienced – but we are committed to always being fair.
Whether open access or traditional model publishing is better for the end reader is really a matter for someone else to decide. There are obvious advantages of online accessibility for anyone with a suitable internet connection. Open access has many advantages for a small independent publisher in that it removes our financial risk. But it still costs money to do everything to a high standard, in a friendly and professional manner. And in fields with very little funding for research projects, let alone to pay for a publication, the traditional model allows authors with no funding at all to publish their work.
So what do you get when you work with a publisher? Quite a lot, in my humble opinion!
We recently held an online event with series editors and authors from our Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching series about publishing their books, with an opportunity for audience questions at the end. Here’s a taster of one of the questions that was discussed, answered by Ali H. Al-Hoorie and Peter D. MacIntyre.
How do you go about finding contributors for an edited volume? What about new researchers who want to publish a chapter in an edited collection? How can they find out about relevant collections?
Ali H. Al-Hoorie and Peter D. MacIntyre
This question has two parts, the first part is from the editors’ perspective. Finding contributors often is a matter of reading the literature and getting to know the people working in an area, including those who shape the history of a field and the recent work as well. Sometimes, as an editor, you hit on an idea whose time has come, and contributors are excited to be part of a collection that recognizes the emergence of a new research area or integrates work on a topic that seems to require it. When an editor has a good idea for a book, new and established scholars alike will want to be part of it. When inviting contributors, especially people who have established themselves in a field, it is important to give enough time to allow them to write a contribution. An editor might also entice contributions with an innovative or flexible format.
From a contributor’s perspective, one way you find out about publishing opportunities is to watch for calls for papers. These might come via an association or mailing list. Perhaps the most popular mailing list is LinguistList. If you follow authors in your field, they might put out a call on social media. Not all books provide an open call for papers, as some are by-invitation only. But there might still be collaboration opportunities with faculty members. A new researcher can join up with an experienced researcher or mentor as a co-author, if they know you are interested.
You can watch the recording of the event and find out the answers to the rest of the audience questions here:
We recently held an online event with series editors and authors from our Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching series about publishing their books, with an opportunity for audience questions at the end. Here’s a taster of one of the questions that was discussed, answered by Ali H. Al-Hoorie and Peter D. MacIntyre.
How do you decide whether to submit an article to an academic journal or mould it into a chapter?
Ali H. Al-Hoorie and Peter D. MacIntyre
One consideration is preferences in your discipline or university for one format or the other, for purposes of landing a position, then getting promotion and tenure. In the humanities, for example, monographs (books) may be considered more valued than articles, and the reverse may be true in the social sciences. That is not always the case, but each researcher might ask senior colleagues about the relative value placed on different formats.
A second consideration is content-related. The peer review process for articles can be quite strict as a journal has a limited number of pages per issue and a continuous stream of submitted papers. In some cases journals have very high rejection rates (80-90%) so the review process may decline good papers because they don’t fit exactly within the scope of the journal or its preferences (e.g. journals often have preferred methodologies). A chapter, which is often invited by an editor as part of a collection of papers, is more likely to offer the writer a little more freedom to explore ideas. Manuscripts that are theoretical in nature may not be as welcome at a journal that focuses on research papers as they would be in an edited collection. Another consideration is of course the reach of a paper and who you think the most suitable audience is.
You can watch the recording of the event and find out the answers to the rest of the audience questions here:
We recently held an online event with series editors and authors from our Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching series about publishing their books, with an opportunity for audience questions at the end. Here’s a taster of one of the questions that was discussed, answered by series editors Sarah Mercer and Stephen Ryan.
What are editors looking for in a proposal when deciding whether to publish a book or not?
Sarah Mercer The key thing is a contribution that belongs in the series you’re submitting your proposal to, so in our case, it must be about the psychology of language learning and teaching. It should have something original to say and the authors need to show that they can identify the gap their research is filling.
Your proposal should be relevant for a global market – it can be researched at a local level but must be reflected on in global terms too. It must be professional in terms of writing and content and should be worthy of book-length treatment and not something that could be covered by an article. It should have a clear coherent thread running through it – something to watch out for especially with an edited collection.
Stephen Ryan In the case of a proposal from an early-career academic, the initial question we are asking is along the lines of “Do we believe this person can deliver a first-class manuscript?” We only have a few pages on which to make that evaluation. We go to each proposal in a positive state of mind; we are looking to encourage publication, not prevent it. It may sound obvious, but a professional presentation of your proposal is important. Careless mistakes, such as errors with names or dates of works cited or clumsily copied chunks of text, start to raise red flags. Basic care and attention make a difference.
Once we start considering the content of a proposal, we are looking for a clear idea; what is the proposed book about and where does it fit within the existing literature? What is unique about the proposed book? Who is likely to be interested in the proposed book?
My own personal view is that reading academic works should not be an ordeal. Reading should be a pleasant, rewarding experience. Evidence of a clear, engaging writing style is always welcome.
You can watch the recording of the event and find out the answers to the rest of the audience questions here:
Last month we held an online event with series editors and authors from our Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching series about publishing their books, with an opportunity for audience questions at the end. Here’s a taster of one of the questions that was discussed, answered by series editors Sarah Mercer and Stephen Ryan.
How do you prepare a successful proposal as an early career academic?
Sarah Mercer and Stephen Ryan
Perhaps the biggest challenge in preparing a book proposal is adapting your research to a very different kind of audience than that of a PhD. As an early-career academic, your potential audience is likely to be unfamiliar with you or your work. That potential audience needs to be persuaded to engage with your work and needs to be persuaded quickly. This means that the scope and purpose of your book must be clear and you must ensure that the findings are relevant beyond the immediate local setting – they must have something to say globally.
When preparing your proposal, it may be a useful strategy to formulate a very brief explanation of your book and why someone should read it – an elevator pitch, if you like. Once you have this in mind, you can use it as a guide for writing the proposal; make sure your proposal does not divert too far from these central ideas.
The proposal should be professionally presented and follow the template provided on the website by Multilingual Matters. It needs to be offering something fresh and appealing to a global audience, so the proposal should make clear what gap it is filling. We would recommend giving your proposal to colleagues for feedback and getting them to ask you questions about it. If you can get hold of examples of past successful proposals, that can help to give you an idea of what is expected.
Take time to get the proposal right, which means getting clarity in your own mind about what exactly you intend and what your main message is. In many respects, a proposal is a unique genre of writing: your task is to present complicated and nuanced ideas clearly and briefly. It is a very difficult balance. When struggling with that balance it is probably better to lean towards the side of clarity and brevity, but a little careful wording can help show that you aware of complexities.
One more point worth thinking about is your title. An attractive, memorable title can go a long way to getting the prospective reader to engage with your work.
You can watch the recording of the event and find out the answers to the rest of the audience questions here:
On the 29th September 2016, exactly 18 months before the UK was due to leave the European Union, I wrote in a blog post entitled Brexit and its Implications for Channel View Publications & Multilingual Matters: Since the UK referendum result to leave the European Union, I have often been asked what effect this will have on our business. These questions have come from authors, colleagues, interested friends and my mother. The honest answer to all has been “I really do not know”.
We are now only five and a half weeks away from the “Brexit date” of 29th March, and I am afraid to say that my answer has not changed very much. I have had more sleepless nights than normal and lost countless hours of productive work time in the past three months as I’ve tried to gain some understanding of what sort of impact the various different versions of Brexit will have. Many different options are still being talked about and have gained traction, lost popularity, been proposed, negotiated and discarded, but what will actually happen, we still do not know.
Immediately after the Brexit vote in June 2016, I was relatively confident that Brexit would not happen as there was just a very slim chance of the various different factions agreeing what kind of Brexit they wanted. Unfortunately I had not predicted that our government would launch down the road of negotiating a Brexit deal with the European Union before knowing what kind of a deal the UK parliament would accept. The past few months of political intrigue and inaction at Westminster have been entertaining, dispiriting and terrifying in equal measures.
Given that we are now facing a potentially very disruptive no-deal Brexit, we at Channel View Publications have had to take steps to plan for the future. We are actively talking to our European trade customers suggesting that we will support them with a small extra discount and longer payment terms should they feel able to stock up on our titles before the 29th March. We are looking to work with printers outside the UK in order to print directly in our major markets like the USA and Japan. We are talking to our printers and distributors to make sure that we understand the likelihood and scale of any serious delays at the EU/UK customs border, and whether this will have a knock-on effect at our airports. We are making sure that our UK distributor has all of the agreements and IT systems in place to provide efficient information to Customs should they need to. We are tightening our belts and building up an emergency fund so that in the event of a drop in sales, or an increase in production costs, or most likely both, we are able to work through this. Whatever happens, we will do our utmost to ensure that our authors and customers continue to receive the same level of support from us as always.
Our hoped-for outcome at the moment is that the government will come to their senses, realise the very real damage that is being done to our economy, and withdraw Article 50 until such a time as those planning for Brexit can achieve a majority for what sort of a future we want with the EU. If that is agreed, and if Brexit is still what the country wants in the full knowledge of how difficult it might be, then resubmit the letter and negotiate properly with the full backing of parliament. This, I suspect, is rather like hoping for Christmas in March…
As January draws to a close we’re looking forward to the upcoming spring conference season, which is always the busiest time of year for both Channel View and Multilingual Matters.
It all kicks off for Channel View in February with Sarah’s annual trip to the other side of the world for CAUTHE, being held this year in Cairns, Australia. Then March brings the usual flurry of US conferences for the Multilingual Matters contingent – between them Laura, Tommi and Anna will be attending NABE in Florida and AAAL and TESOL in Atlanta, all in the space of a week! As April comes around we’ll be staying a bit closer to home, with Laura heading off again, this time to IATEFL in Liverpool, while Sarah makes her way down south to Bournemouth University for the TTRA Europe conference.
If you’re planning to be at any of these conferences, do make sure you pop by the stand to say hello to us. We love catching up with our authors, having the opportunity to put faces to names and are always very happy to discuss potential projects with you. We’ll also have plenty of interesting titles for you to browse, including a whole host of brand new ones, and they’ll all be on sale at a special conference discount, so you’re bound to find a bargain!
You can keep up with our whereabouts this conference season by following us on social media.
This month we published Investigating Content and Language Integrated Learning edited by Liss Kerstin Sylvén. In this post we ask her about her research on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and the process of putting together an edited volume.
How did you first become interested in studying CLIL?
The first time I ever encountered CLIL (which was at a time when I had never even heard of the concept) was when I substituted as an English teacher at a Swedish upper secondary school, and one of the teachers there told me that they were planning to start using English as the medium of instruction in some non-language subjects. I remember my reaction being a big Why? Why should Swedish teachers, at a Swedish school, with Swedish students use English as the medium of instruction? That was the starting point for my interest in studying effects of CLIL, and very soon after this first encounter with CLIL, I wrote my bachelor thesis on the topic.
Why did you feel this was an important book to write?
There are so many uninformed views on CLIL, and often it is seen as only good or only bad. In other words, many people see it as black or white. What is important with this book is that it describes a unique, longitudinal project which has resulted in a huge number of interesting findings. The most important of them are found in this collection, and together they show that CLIL is far from black or white, but rather represents a number of nuances that need to be taken into account in order to fully understand what CLIL is, can be, and can do, in a certain context.
Why is the Swedish context a particularly interesting one to research? What can policymakers in other countries learn from this example?
Every country is interesting in its own right from the perspective of effects of CLIL. Sweden is interesting not least due to the fact that English is so widespread in society and the level of English proficiency is generally high. An interesting question, then, has been what role CLIL can play in our society. The brief answer is that CLIL can play an important role, but it has to be done in the right circumstances. For instance, teachers need to be sufficiently prepared and trained for CLIL teaching, and focus should be on academic language, rather than the everyday language which students encounter in abundance outside of school. Sweden is also interesting as we have seen a significant increase in the number of students with a non-Swedish background in our schools during the last decades. A pertinent question is if CLIL can help bridge barriers between this group of students and those with a Swedish background.
Policymakers in other countries can tailor decisions based on our findings in the Swedish context that may be relevant for their own context. By reading the volume, they will hopefully become aware of the very important role the local context plays, and that decisions need to be based on them, not on results from contexts different from their own.
As you compiled your book, did anything in the research particularly surprise or intrigue you?
What has surprised me throughout the work with the project, on which the book is based, is how positive everybody involved in CLIL seems to be about using English as the medium of instruction part of the time in school. Students, teachers, administrators – all have a very confident view of CLIL, and this, of course, is highly interesting from an educational viewpoint. With a positive mindset, teaching and learning is definitely facilitated.
Putting together any edited volume is a major undertaking. How did you find the process?
I would lie if I were to say that it was an easy process. It was not! Primarily I think the fact that we are as many as fourteen contributors to this volume, played a role in making it quite complicated at times – who had done what? Who needed a reminder? Who was waiting for feedback? Etc. However, the multitude of viewpoints presented by each and every one of us is, of course, also one of the strengths of this book. And, the support given to me as the editor of the book by Multilingual Matters throughout this entire process has been invaluable. I have learnt so much by working with this volume, knowledge that I do not want to be without!
What advice would you offer to an academic writing or editing their first book?
Make sure that the topic is one that you really, really care about! Find a good publisher who is enthusiastic about the idea! Once there is such a topic and such a publisher, just go for it. Yes, it entails a lot of work, but in the end, it is definitely worth it.
You painted the image on your book cover yourself. Have you been painting for long? What was the inspiration behind this piece?
To answer your first question, I have always painted! Some periods more, some less, but it’s always there as my favorite escape from stress and problems of any kind. When I paint, I think good thoughts, and I often unconsciously come up with new ways of looking at things. The motif for the cover of the book came to me very early on in the process. When I realized we were going to get the book published, I started seeing it as it would look on the bookshelf, and I saw it pretty much as it now looks. I have tried to illustrate the move from seeing CLIL as something that is either black or white, to something full of shades of various colors. I couldn’t have been happier than when you all agreed to actually use it for the cover of the book!
What books – either for work or for pleasure – are you reading at the moment?
For pleasure, I’m reading Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker (absolutely fascinating!), and Michelle Obama’s biography Becoming. For work, I am re-reading Identity and Language Learning by Bonny Norton (Multilingual Matters, 2013), and Miho Inaba’s very recent and interesting book on extramural Japanese, Second Language Literacy Practices and Language Learning Outside the Classroom (Multilingual Matters, 2019) – pure coincidence with two books from Multilingual Matters 🙂
For more information about this book please see our website.
Less than a decade ago, we finished our dissertations and started new lives as professors, which eventually led us to write our first single-authored books. For the benefit of colleagues on similar journeys, we wanted to share our reflections on the experience, and also note the exciting, new directions in which this process has taken us.
Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters 