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

Conclusion
This chapter has focused on both the typical organizational patterns of
Results/Findings chapters or sections and some of the language features com-
monly found within the different stages of the chapter. It is argued that for
second-language speakers the need to understand the rhetorical purposes of
this section is important and that to see the main purpose as simply being
about the presentation of results may create a misleading impression.
Application
Ask your student to read two or three results sections of recent theses
from either your school or department or an online repository. Ask
them to identify an organizational pattern they prefer and to tell you
which features of the organization they might use in their own thesis
or dissertation.
Ask them to note:
●
how the research results are presented;
●
whether the three moves as shown in Table 9.1 occur;
●
in what order they occur;
●
the extent of recycling of the moves;
●
the purpose of each of the moves;
●
whether writers make claims about their results as well as describe
them.

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Introduction
The first part of this chapter looks at how Discussion chapters are typically
organized and provides a framework that will help students write this section
of the thesis or dissertation. Basturkman and Bitchener (2005; Bitchener and
Basturkman 2006) have discussed the difficulties second-language students
have with this part of their thesis. Students often lack an understanding, they
argue, of the function of this part of their thesis or dissertation. As one of the
supervisors they spoke to said: they thought there was a tendency for stu-
dents to give more weight again to their own interpretations rather than
use other academic texts to make or to support their claims (Bitchener and
Basturkman 2006).
That is, students are often not aware of the need, in the Discussion section,
to show the relationship between the results of their study and the results of
similar studies and related arguments in the published literature. Bitchener
and Basturkman also found that students tend to overstate their claims, partly
perhaps because of their inability to ‘hedge’ in their writing (see making
claims and hedging below). A further problem they noted is the tendency of
students to mix the Results and Discussion sections of their thesis. Each of the
students they spoke to in their study expressed uncertainty about what content
should be included in the Discussion section and how it should be organized.