Rise in Predatory Publishing: A Critical English for Academic Purposes Approach

There are demands on TEFL students and researchers from national authorities to publish widely. Because of the growing pressure put on students and their professors in the area of humanities especially TEFL to publish in national and international journals, it is often tempting for them to take the shortest possible root to get their articles published. Thus, the objective of this paper is to explore why publishing in predatory journals has been growing among students in higher education. In this article the researchers drew on critical English for academic purposes approach (CEAP) and Bourdieu’s (1991) concept of symbolic violence to demonstrate how violence and domination are reproduced in higher education which causes students to publish in predatory journals. In order to look into students’ views regarding predatory publishing a structured questionnaire was developed by the researchers and distributed among 52 PhD and MA students. The results of this study state that academic institutions and professors can exert symbolic violence that silence students’ voices. This study pervades critical pedagogy and right analysis into the learning system in order to democratize higher education institutions and to enact genuine and meaningful student engagement in the process of article publication.