Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language: A Handbook for Supervisors

Brian Paltridge & Sue Starfield Thesis and Dissertation Writing Second in a Language a handbook for supervisors.

Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language.

Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language.

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park,Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN.

Contents. List of illustrations vi Acknowledgements viii.

Illustrations. Figures. 1.1 Text and context in academic writing 18 2.1 Interrelationships between level of English language proficiency and research status 24 2.2 The role perception scale 38 3.1 A simplified model of the writing process 46 3.2 A more realistic model of the writing process 47 3.3 The reciprocal relationship of writing and thinking 47 6.1 The thesis hourglass 84 8.1 Visual map of typical components of a Methodology chapter 123 9.1 Making claims: some examples of hedging 143.

Illustrations vii. 11.1 Use of verb tenses in thesis and dissertation Abstracts 159 11.2 Moves in Acknowledgements sections 161.

This book is the result of many years of teaching, talking and thinking about thesis and dissertation writing with our students, colleagues, friends and families. We thank them all. We would also like to acknowledge the many doctoral and master’s students whose theses have contributed extracts to this book. Specifically we would like to thank Dwight Atkinson, Diane Belcher, Chris Casanave, Andy Curtis, Tony Dudley-Evans, Chris Feak, Liz Hamp- Lyons, Alan Hirvela, Cynthia Nelson, Louise Ravelli and John Swales for their interest, support and inspiration; Tracey-Lee Downey for her help with illustrations; our anonymous reviewers as well as Philip Mudd at RoutledgeFalmer for his support for our project and Lucy Wainwright, also at RoutledgeFalmer, for seeing our project through to completion. Being able to develop and teach our courses in thesis and dissertation writ- ing has been and continues to be a rewarding experience for us both. From what our students tell us, they find the courses very helpful with the development of their own writing. Writing a research thesis in a language that is not your native one is undoubtedly a challenge. We hope that other students and their supervisors will find our book helpful in meeting that challenge and that the students’ unique contribution to knowledge in their field will be enhanced. Sue would especially like to acknowledge her parents for their uncondi- tional love and support and thank Alan, Sophia and Jeremy for putting up with her during the writing process. She would also like to thank Adrian Lee and Richard Henry for their encouragement and her Learning Centre col- leagues for being passionate about writing. Brian would like to acknowledge the support he has in his faculty for the work that he does, and his colleagues and research students there for making it the place to be that it is..

Background to the book. The aim of this book is to provide a handbook for supervisors who are work- ing with students writing a thesis or dissertation1 in English as their second language. The book aims to unpack some of the tacit understanding that supervisors often have of the thesis or dissertation writing process that is often not shared by their students, and in this case, students who come from a language and culture background other than English. The book is also suit- able for teachers who run courses or workshops on thesis and dissertation writing for second-language students. There are practical examples, learning tasks, and examples from completed theses and dissertations throughout the book. The learning tasks are designed to help students develop the skills and understandings necessary for successful thesis and dissertation writing. These learning tasks include a focus on aspects of language use particular to thesis and dissertation writing, as well as the social and cultural expectations partic- ular to writing a thesis or dissertation, such as what is expected of students in this kind of writing and at this level of study, expectations of students and supervisors in the supervision and thesis writing process, the issue of discipli- nary differences in thesis writing, and what examiners expect of theses and dissertations written in English-medium universities. The book includes a focus on theory and research, where appropriate, as well as providing practical advice on thesis and dissertation writing for second- language students. It discusses issues that are common to all thesis and dissertation writers, such as understanding the setting and purpose of thesis and dissertation writing, the place of audience in thesis and dissertation writ- ing, understanding writer/reader relationships, issues of writer identity, and the place of assumed background knowledge in thesis and dissertation writing. Each unit of the book focuses on a particular aspect of thesis and disser- tation writing and the research and supervision process. The sequencing of the units follows the stages of carrying out research and writing a thesis or dissertation. Each of the units includes tasks for supervisors to use with their students. The tasks are written in a way that encourages students to.

explore the points that are covered in each chapter in relation to their own discipline-specific and academic situation. While there are a large number of texts that offer support to students with assignment writing, there are far fewer that offer support to students who are writing a thesis or dissertation. Furthermore, assignment writing is a quanti- tatively and qualitatively different task to writing a thesis or dissertation and managing the writing process over a sustained period of time. There are a number of books that offer advice to research students but very few of these provide detailed instruction in the writing of the actual thesis and hardly any offer specific advice to students from non-English-speaking backgrounds (see Paltridge 2002 for further discussion of this). We hope that the approach to the conceptualizing and teaching of thesis and dissertation writing presented in this book will be of benefit to our disciplinary colleagues. The approach adopted is one which explicitly teaches the expecta- tions, conventions, structure and organization of the various sections of the typical thesis and dissertation. It also draws on authentic instances of theses and dissertations to illustrate these features of the texts. While the aim of this book is to make the issues we discuss clear to second-language students and their supervisors, there is much in this book that will also be of use to native-speaker students, and to students who have already studied in an English-medium uni- versity but have not previously written a text of the kind we are discussing..

● cross-cultural issues in thesis and dissertation writing;.

honours, a master’s, or a doctoral degree. This has implications for the breadth and scale of the student’s research project. Another important issue is the kind of study area the student’s text is being written in; that is, whether it is written in what Becher and Trowler (2001) call a ‘hard’ or a ‘soft’ discipline, a ‘pure’ or ‘applied’ discipline, or a ‘conver- gent’ or ‘divergent’ area of study. This has important implications for understanding the values, ideologies and research perspectives that are priori- tized in the students’ area/s of study. Students can be asked, for example, to consider whether academic staff in their area of study share the same basic ide- ologies, judgments and values (a convergent area of study) or whether their research perspectives are drawn from other areas of study (a divergent area of study). They might consider whether there is more variation in what might be considered ‘research’ in their particular area of study, and to what extent this makes a difference as to what students can ‘say’ and do. This discussion helps students to place their dissertation in its particular academic setting as well as to bring to the fore the sets of values that hold in their area of study that might be shared by members of academic staff, but not openly expressed by them..

field, for their examiners, or for their supervisor? And who counts most in judg- ing whether their text meets the requirements of their particular area of study? Theses and dissertations are typically written for a primary readership of one or more examiners. In some cases the student’s supervisor may be one of the examiners and in other cases they may not. If the supervisor is not one of the student’s examiners, they will be a secondary reader of the student’s text, not a primary one. This difference between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ reader- ships (Brookes and Grundy 1990) is significant, and is often not immediately obvious to students. In the case of thesis and dissertation writing, it is the pri- mary reader that is the final judge as to the quality of the student’s piece of work, rather than the secondary reader. As Kamler and Threadgold (1997: 53) point out, a dominant or ‘primary’ reader within the academy, ‘quite sim- ply counts more than other readers’ (such as friends, learning advisors and anyone else the student shows their text to). It is important, then, for stu- dents to consider the expert, ‘all-powerful reader’ of their texts who can either accept, or reject, their writing as being coherent and consistent with the con- ventions of the target discourse community (Johns 1990) and how they will (potentially) read their text..

Discourse community expectations and thesis and dissertation writing.

Introduction 7. Attitudes to knowledge and different levels of study.

Table 1.1 The social and cultural context of theses and dissertations.

Table 1.2 Attitudes to knowledge, approaches to learning and different levels of study.

vary in relation to the different learning tasks they are undertaking. Notwithstanding, English-medium academic institutions often share a dominant set of attitudes towards knowledge and learning strategies that are not immediately apparent to many second-language students writing a thesis or dissertation in English (Ballard and Clanchy 1997)..

Although Kaplan has since revised his strong claim that differences in acade- mic writing are the result of culturally different ways of thinking, many studies have found important differences in the ways in which academic texts are written in different languages and cultures. Other studies, however, have found important similarities in academic writing across cultures. Kubota (1997), for example, argues that studies in the area of contrastive rhetoric tend to overgeneralize the cultural characteristics of writing from a few spe- cific examples. She argues that just as Japanese expository writing, for example, has more than one rhetorical style, so does English, and that it is misleading to try to reduce rhetorical styles to the one single norm. Leki (1997) has argued that contrastive rhetoric oversimplifies not only other cultures but also ways of writing in English. She points out that while second- language students may often be taught to write in a standard way, professional writers do not necessarily write this way in English. She argues that many rhetorical devices that are said to be typical of Chinese, Japanese and Thai writ- ing, for example, also occur in certain contexts in English. Equally, features that are said to be typical of English writing appear on occasion in other languages as well. Contrastive rhetoric, she argues, can most usefully be seen, not as the study of culture-specific thought patterns, but as the study of ‘the differences or preferences in the pragmatic and strategic choices that writers make in response to external demands and cultural histories’ (Leki 1997: 244). Kubota and Lehner (2004) have argued that contrastive rhetoric takes a deficit view of students’ second-language academic writing. They also argue that much contrastive rhetoric research presents differences in academic writ- ing that do not always exist. An example of this is the view of Chinese academic writing being circular and indirect and English academic writing being linear and direct. Some Chinese students have said:.

result of how ideas are presented in the text, but also depends on the ways in which the writer has created cohesive links within and between sentences as well as within and between paragraphs in the text. This is especially impor- tant for English writing which is sometimes referred to as writer-responsible, as opposed to other languages (such as Japanese) where written texts are some- times described as being reader-responsible (see Chapter 3 for further discussion of this). That is, in English it is often the writer’s responsibility to make the sense of their text clear to their reader. Theses and dissertations in English, then, are characterized by a large amount of ‘display of knowledge’; that is, telling the reader something they may already know and, in some cases, may know better than the student. Often a second-language student will say ‘I didn’t say that because I thought you already knew it’. This, however, is exactly what thesis and dissertation writers do in English, and is something many second-language students may find strange or unnatural. It is important, then, not to take a stereotyped view of how students from one culture will necessarily write in another. There may be substantial differ- ences, and there may not. It is not always easy to predict what these differences may be. One way of finding this out is to ask students if they have written the same kind of text in their first language and in what ways that text was similar or different to the one they are now writing in English. Prince (2000) did this in a study in which she asked Polish and Chinese stu- dents who had already written a dissertation in their first language how similar or different they found dissertation writing in English. She found that, although the students had all written a dissertation in their first lan- guage, they had little idea of how they should do this in English. She also found that different students had different views on how they wanted to rep- resent themselves in their English texts. She argues that we ‘should be wary of generalizing about students from different cultural backgrounds, because all students are individuals’ (Prince 2000: 1) and may have their own preferences and ways of writing that are especially important to them..

that adding the word ‘please’ adds politeness to a request, which in some ways it does, without realizing that sending their supervisor an email say- ing ‘I’ve finished Chapter 3. Please check it’ is not sufficiently polite (in most circumstances) for this kind of request. Different views of cultural appropriateness, thus, can lead to misunder- standings and prevent effective cross-cultural communication. This is particularly the case where students and supervisors come from different lan- guage and cultural backgrounds. As Cargill (2000) points out, although students have passed the university’s English language admission require- ments, they are often under-prepared for the face-to-face interactions that are part of the student/supervisor arrangement. These face-to-face interactions are a crucial part of the supervisory process. They are, however, fraught with the potential for misunderstandings, especially in cross-cultural communica- tion situations (Moses 1984). Supervisors and students, then, need to be aware of and expect cross-cul- tural differences in their interactions with each other. If communication problems arise, they need to be prepared to talk about them. Native speakers of a language, in fact, are often much less tolerant of these kinds of errors in cross-cultural communication situations than they are, for example, of gram- matical errors. If a student says something the supervisor thought was rude, it is easy for the supervisor to think the student ‘meant to be rude’, rather than that they did not now how to do something in a culturally different way. These are issues which are discussed in further chapters of the book..

or place in things. As Hyland points out, however, ‘almost everything we write says something about us and the sort of relationship that we want to set up with our readers’. Establishing writer identity is often difficult for second- language writers. This is further complicated by students having a different way of writing and different ‘voice’ in their first-language academic writing (see Hirvela and Belcher 2001 for further discussion of this). Prince (2000) looked at the issue of writer identity in second-language thesis writing. Her interest was in the ways in which second-language writers might be influenced (or not) by their experience of having written a thesis in their first language and culture. She looked at the experiences of a group of Chinese and Polish students, all of whom had written a thesis in their first language prior to writing a thesis in English. She found a major theme that emerged in her study was whether the students had to give up, or change, their personal identity in order to write a successful thesis in English. Prince tells how one of her Polish students, Ilona, fiercely fought to retain her per- sonal and individual style of writing, but in the end found she had to give this away in order to pass. Bartolome (1998: xiii) argues that learning to succeed in western academic settings is not just a matter of language, but of knowing the ‘linguistically contextualised language’ of the particular discourse that is valued in the par- ticular academic setting. Many students find this a difficult thing to do. They may fear a loss of cultural identity and not wish to be ‘drowned’ in the new academic culture. Ilona, the Polish student in Prince’s study, felt exactly this. Other student experiences reported on in the research literature, however, have been slightly different. A Chinese student, for example, in Shen’s (1989) study felt that learning to write in a new way added another dimension to himself and to his view of the world. This did not mean, he said, that he had lost his Chinese identity. Indeed, he said, he would never lose this. Students do, however, have to learn to write in a way that is often new and different for them and have to balance their new identity with their old one. This is as much about cultural views of writing as it is about new and different rela- tionships between student writers with their new and imagined readers, their supervisors and their examiners. As Silva and Matsuda point out, writing is always embedded in a complex web of relationships between writers and readers. These relationships, further, are constantly changing. As they argue:.

Student writers, then:. do not write in isolation but within networks of more and less powerfully situated colleagues and community members. They learn to forge alliances with those community members with whom they share values or whom they perceive will benefit them in some way and to resist when accommodating does not suit them. (Casanave 2002: xiii–xiv).

disciplinary differences in research articles and academic textbooks. These are not the same as theses and dissertations, however. Research articles and text- books have different audiences and different goals from theses and dissertations. Research articles, as mentioned earlier, are ‘experts writing for experts’. Thesis and dissertation writing, however, is much more a case of students writing ‘for admission to an area of study’. While there are some similarities between each of these kinds of texts, there are also important differences. Hyland’s (2004a) study of master’s and doctoral students’ writing points to many of the unique features of thesis and dissertation writing, as well as important disciplinary differences in this kind of writing. One important feature he examines is metadiscourse in thesis and dissertation writing; that is, the ways thesis writers use language to organize what they want to say in their text, how they ‘shape their arguments to the needs and expectations of their target readers’ (Hyland 2004a: 134) and how they show their stance towards the content and the reader of their text. This topic is returned to in detail later in this book. It is important to point out, however, that Hyland did find there were important differences in the use of metadiscourse across disciplines. He also found there were differences in the use of metadiscourse across degrees. He found, for example, that PhD students used much more metadiscourse to show the organization of their texts than did master’s stu- dents. This could be partly explained, he suggests, by the longer length of PhD texts requiring students to show the arrangement of their texts more than at the master’s level. It could also be, he suggests, the result of doctoral students being generally more sophisticated writers than master’s students and much more aware of the need to write reader-friendly texts and to engage with their readers. In terms of disciplinary differences he found social science disciplines used the most metadiscourse overall, especially in the use of hedges (such as possible, might, tend to and perhaps). The social sciences stu- dents also used more attitude markers (such as unfortunately, surprisingly, and interestingly) and self mentions (such as I, we, my and our). Thompson (1999) carried out a study in which he interviewed PhD supervi- sors about organization, presentation, citation and argumentation practices in PhD theses in different areas of study. He looked, in particular, at theses written in the areas of agricultural botany and agricultural economics. He found a wide range of differences, even in the length of the texts that he examined. He also found quite different views of how students were told they should position themselves in relation to their texts. One supervisor, for example, argued that the research project should be the main focus of the thesis and the author should not intrude on this by using the personal ‘I’ in their writing. Another supervi- sor gave the opposite advice when he felt the use of personal pronouns would help the student to communicate their ideas. Thompson’s work suggests that is really not possible to say there is one single way in which theses and disserta- tions should be written in a university. How the thesis is written will be influenced by a number of things. It will be influenced by the set of values.

underlying the particular discipline in which it is written, by the research per- spective the student adopts, as well as by advice that is given to the student by their supervisor (see Chapter 5 for further discussion of thesis types and disci- plinary differences in thesis and dissertation writing)..

● appropriately developed conclusions and implications that are linked to the research framework and findings;.

and clarity of the reporting and discussion of findings, and the extent to which the findings can be applied in the field. Holbrook and her colleagues also identified characteristics of ‘low qual- ity’ PhD theses. Low quality theses were defined as theses that were required to be revised and resubmitted for re-examination by at least half of the examiners. The characteristics of these theses are also shown in Table 1.3. With low quality theses there was a wider range of agreement amongst examiners. The reports written for these theses were much longer than those that were written for high quality theses. They contained a prepon- derance of instructed comment, more negative judgment, and a greater emphasis on editorial errors and inaccuracies in the referencing of the liter- ature than was the case for high quality thesis reports..

Overview of the book. This chapter has provided a background to thesis and dissertation writing as well as introducing a number of issues that are of particular relevance to sec- ond-language thesis and dissertation writers. It has discussed the social and cultural contexts of thesis and dissertation writing and factors within this context that impact on the writing of the student’s thesis and dissertation. It has discussed the relationship between thesis writers and readers, including what examiners expect to see in a successful student text. It has also discussed disciplinary differences in thesis and dissertation writing, as well as approaches to knowledge at different levels of study. Cross-cultural issues and writer identity in thesis and dissertation writing have also been discussed. A number of these themes will be taken up in greater detail further in the book. The next chapter of the book discusses what it means to be a non-native- speaker research student in an English-medium university. It looks at definitions of the ‘non-native-speaker student’ and the challenges that face non-native-speaker students in this role. It discusses, in more detail, cross- cultural communication problems between non-native-speaker students and their supervisors as well as suggesting strategies for dealing with these. It also offers suggestions for ways in which supervisors can help support non-native- speaker students in learning to become successful research students and thesis or dissertation writers..

Note. 1 The terms ‘thesis’ and ‘dissertation’ are used in different ways in different parts of the world. In this book, the term ‘dissertation’ is used for undergraduate and master’s degrees and ‘the- sis’ for doctoral degrees..

The first language of many international candidates is not English and this adds to the time and effort supervisors in all disciplines put into ver- bal communication and candidates’ written work. Supervisors are additionally burdened both by their knowledge of the distinct linguistic, cultural, familial and professional pressures that international candidates’ circumstances exert on the candidate, and by perceived financial pres- sures from universities to take on increasing numbers of full-fee-paying international candidates. (Sinclair 2005: 19).

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Topic/area of study 1. It is a supervisor’s responsibility 1 2 3 4 5 It is a student’s responsibility to to select a promising topic. select a promising topic. 2. In the end, it is up to the 1 2 3 4 5 A student has the right to supervisor to decide which choose a theoretical standpoint theoretical frame of reference is even if it conflicts with that of most appropriate. the supervisor. 3. A supervisor should direct a 1 2 3 4 5 A student should be able to student in the development of an work out a schedule and appropriate programme of research programme appropriate research and study. to their needs. 4. A supervisor should ensure 1 2 3 4 5 Ultimately, the student must find that a student has access to the necessary facilities, materials all necessary facilities, and support to complete their materials and support. research..

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