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

Application: making claims
Ask your student to look at the following extract from the Discussion
section of a master’s thesis and look at the way the writers have made
claims. To what extent, and how, have they hedged their claims?
This would seem to suggest that knowledge of another European
language did not prevent first language features from being carried
over into English. If students did not transfer punctuation and styl-
istic features from French into English, there seems to be no
grounds for assuming that they transferred discourse patterns from
French. There appears to be a strong probability that the students’
use of English discourse patterns reflects the fact that Arabic dis-
course patterns do not differ radically from English ones, at least in
so far as expository texts are concerned. Written discourse may dif-
fer in the style of presentation between the two cultures, but the
style merely reflects superficial syntactic differences, not contrast-
ing methods of overall discourse structure.
(Cooley and Lewkowicz 2003: 84)

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The Conclusions are what the Discussion chapter has been arguing for.
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The Conclusions may be a separate chapter or they may be combined
with the Discussion chapter, labelled ‘Discussion and Conclusions’.
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The Conclusions reached in this chapter should be drawn from the
Discussion chapter.
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There should be no further discussion in the Conclusions chapter.
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The Conclusions should respond to the aims that were stated in the first
chapter.
A summary of findings, they point out, is not the same as conclusions.
Summaries are a statement of what the student found out; conclusions are a
statement of the significance of what they found out. Often a Conclusions
chapter is only a few pages long, as opposed to the Discussion chapter which
should be much longer and much more extensive in its elaboration and refer-
ence to prior research.