English as a lingua franca; academic English scientific English;ELFA corpus; SciElF corpus

The paper strives to reveal the competences and knowledge advanced users of English or fresh English Studies graduates still lack to achieve the native-speaker level in scientific writing. The paper presents findings resulting from a contrastive analysis of research articles to be submitted to peer-reviewed journals published in English and their final submitted versions proofread by native speakers/professional proof-readers. The research is a case study grounded in a qualitative analysis investigating corrections of issues seen as inappropriate on a variety of levels. The results are compared with findings brought by the ELFA project at the University of Helsinki (Anna Mauranen 2010, 2012) and are viewed as inspirational for advanced training of ELF users, future EFL teachers and professional translators.