In 2008 Ana Moreno initiated discussions with researchers with supplementary and/or similar research concerns from another four Spanish institutions (Jesús Rey Rocha and Ramón Rodríguez from the CSIC, Sally Burgess and Pedro Martín from Universidad de La Laguna, Mª Lluisa Gea Valor from Jaume I Universitat and Rosa Lorés, Pilar Mur and Enrique Lafuente from the Universidad de Zaragoza) and with expert consultants from three foreign universities (John Swales from The University of Michigan, Itesh Sachdev from The University of London and Theresa Lillis from the Open University) to collaborate in a large-scale research project. By bringing this multidisciplinary team of researchers together, she has taken a step towards making connections between fields, theories and research methods whose results she believes will fruitfully contribute to helping Spanish researchers enhance their academic writing skills for research publication purposes.
In 2010 Ana Moreno set up an interuniversity research group called ENEIDA (Spanish Team for Intercultural Studies on Academic Discourse), based at the University of León, to formalize the interdisciplinary research collaborations established among this team of researchers (http://hdl.handle.net/10612/1824 [25/07/2012]). A website for this newly created research group is under construction. The team’s first joint research project is entitled Rhetorical Strategies to Get Published in International Scientific Journals from a Spanish-English Intercultural Perspective (I), which has been funded by the Spanish National Plan for R+D+i (2010-2012). As the Principal Investigator of this project, one of Ana Moreno’s research responsibilities has been to coordinate the analysis of Spanish researchers’ needs vis-à-vis training in writing in English for research publication purposes, one main aim of Phase 1 of the project (http://hdl.handle.net/10612/1823 [25/07/2012]).
Working in close collaboration, Ana Moreno, Jesús Rey, Sally Burgess (assisted by Irene López, our technician for phase 1, and advised by Itesh Sachdev, our expert consultant for phase 1, designed an online survey with various aims in mind: mainly, to identify the scientific fields where the need for training in writing for research publication purposes is greatest in order to carry out relevant needs analyses, to provide large-scale data for follow-up studies on factors affecting writing and learning to write English for research publication purposes, and to assess the relevance and viability in given scientific fields of the intercultural and crosscultural studies planned for the next phases of the project, which Ana Moreno is also coordinating.
The online survey was launched at the end of 2010 among a population of 8794 doctors affiliated to the five Spanish institutions participating in the project. This was done thanks to the kind collaboration of the five institutions and of the team members at each of the institutions. The survey was successfully completed by 1717 informants, to whom the team is very grateful. Descriptive results from this survey have already been presented at various national and international conferences and have been published as working documents (https://buleria.unileon.es/handle/10612/1757 [06/06/12]). Various research articles are being written up by team members from the five institutions to disseminate results from analysing the questionnaire data through relevant scientific journals, the first of which has been published in Ibérica (http://www.aelfe.org/documents/13_24_Moreno.pdf).
The ENEIDA Reseach Group met in September 2012 to coordinate actions for Phase 2 of the project, in which a number of crosscultural studies of research articles across English and Castilian Spanish will be carried out. All in all, the project aims to establish the foundations for future more focussed applied research studies aiming to inform the design and development of relevant teaching resources specifically designed for Spanish learners of English for research publication purposes.
