Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language: a handbook for Supervisors

participation and the temporal and spatial aspects 
style. Who 
of sailfish movements. The tagging data were 
analyzed the 
analyzed to determine recapture rates, days at 
data is not 
liberty, distance traveled (linear displacement), 
considered 
spatial pattern of recaptures and estimates of 
important.
probability for survival and recovery. During
Impersonal verbs
the period of 19 November 1998 to 7 April 2004 
in passive voice
a total of 2053 ERWDA tags were deployed on 
are italicized
Gulf sailfish by 45 captains and 841 anglers 
participating in the program.
Source: Hoolihan 2005: 19

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and articulate as they grapple with, for example, the complex theoretical
frameworks, methodologies and innovative presentation formats of theses in
very qualitative areas such as the new humanities. For, as Richardson (2000)
has argued, in qualitative research, writing becomes an integral part of the
research process. Nevertheless, more recently, Belcher and Hirvela (2005) have
shown that with motivation, encouragement and support, second-language
speakers may successfully rise to the challenge of writing a qualitative thesis.
They point out, however, that the processes of qualitative research place ‘par-
ticularly heavy demands on writers and language users’ (Belcher and Hirvela
2005: 189), not only in the carrying out of fieldwork, interviews, observation,
reflection and data analysis but also because the genres for reporting qualita-
tive research are ill-defined and ‘fuzzy’. So, as Turner (2003) advises, students
should be made aware that there may be risks associated with challenging
accepted forms of thesis writing and that successful theses should always be
constructed around a convincing, intelligible argument whatever the method-
ologies or approaches involved.
Two of the second-language students interviewed by Belcher and Hirvela
(2005: 199) had devised useful strategies for helping them to cope with the
lack of a predictable format for qualitative research. Chantsvang set up a sup-
port group with friends who were writing qualitative dissertations: ‘I found
myself drowning in data ... I discussed what problems I had, and they dis-
cussed their problems as we tend to exchange our opinions’. Another student,
Liang, found that reading a lot of qualitative research articles in her field
helped her write up her data: ‘I really read carefully how do TESOL scholars
do their discourse analysis’.