Publication Language Policy in Qatar’s Higher Education Sector and Construction of a Questionnaire to Investigate Attitudes, Challenges, and Strategies

Qatar can be positioned within the outer circle of Kachru’s (1992) model of world Englishes. The outer circle includes countries where English is used as an official language and has a significant role in education, government, and media but is not the mother tongue for the majority. This situation has created some challenges for different sectors in Qatar, including higher education. Some welcome the situation, considering English as the Lingua Franca; others, however, consider this as a threat to the Arabic language. Qatar University, for example, changed the language of instruction from English to Arabic. Regarding scholarly publication, while universities in Qatar recognize publications in English, there are aspirations from Arab scholars to publish in Arabic. This study intends to investigate current policies in Qatar’s key universities as well as constructing a questionnaire to elicit faculty members’ attitudes, challenges, and strategies for publishing scholarly works. This study will investigate the policies of key Qatari universities regarding publication language policy. It also intends to construct a questionnaire to investigate the attitudes, strategies, and challenges faced by Arab scholars in Qatar concerning scholarly publications. Previous research highlights a variety of barriers that Arab scholars encounter, including difficulties navigating the peer review process, inadequate mentorship, and the pressures of meeting international publishing standards (Elgamri et al., 2023). Considering the challenges these scholars face, in many cases, they are drawn to predatory journals due to their faster publication processes and higher acceptance rates (Shehata & Elgllab, 2018). Additionally, scholars often search for information primarily in Arabic, which can limit their exposure to international research and reduce collaboration with global academic networks (Shehata, 2019). At the same time, Arabic-language research remains underrepresented in international journals, further contributing to its marginalization (Johnson, 2018). This reliance on Arabic publications also reflects a broader issue in the region, where scholars face the dilemma of "publish globally and perish locally" versus "publish locally and perish globally" (Hanafi, 2011). In other words, scholars may have to choose between gaining international recognition at the expense of local impact or prioritizing regional relevance while sacrificing global visibility.

Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU)