CHALLENGES IN CONDUCTING ACADEMIC RESEARCH AND PUBLICATION: EXPLORING THE EXPERIENCES OF LANGUAGE TEACHERS IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS IN GHANA

Özet

The tri-focal functions of the academic workforce in a Higher Educational Institution are research, teaching and community engagement. While many studies on higher education learning have focused on teaching, this study focuses on research. The decision to focus on research is consistent with Chireshe et al (2014) that, among the tri-focal functions, research is central. The study is an attempt to empirically identify, investigate and report the experiences of language tutors relative to the challenges they encounter in the process of conducting academic research and publication. The study sample was all the 16 language tutors from the Colleges of Education who had gathered to undertake Conference Marking for the first semester of the 2020/2021 academic year. The study is qualitative and adopts interview as the main data collection instrument. The data were analysed using descriptive and thematic analysis. The outcome of the study reveals that the language tutor encounters several language-related challenges in the conduct of research and publication such as language barrier between researcher and study sample, language of journals and publication outlets, language of targeted audience/readership, language of technology, attitude towards language, challenge with qualitative nature of language studies, language policy inconsistencies, conceptualization issues, writing skill issues and funding. The findings of this study should be instrumental in the development of interventions to increase research output and enculturate research attitude in the Colleges.