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

Conclusion
While many of the issues that confront second-language students in the tran-
sition to the role of postgraduate student are similar to those that the native
speaker of English may be facing, the costs for the second-language speaker
will tend to be higher, both financially and in terms of the challenges they
may encounter, a number of which have been outlined in this chapter. There
is much that the proactive supervisor can do to alleviate these costs and we
have suggested a number of strategies that might usefully be adopted. The
words of a second-language speaker who is successfully working as an acade-
mic in an Australian university sum up the ideal that we all strive for:
Doctoral supervision is a profound and lengthy joint venture involving
both the supervisor and student, to nurture the development of a compe-
tent, autonomous researcher and to explore, and make a contribution to,
the global academic environment. It is a demanding yet rewarding once
in a lifetime experience involving two individuals’ interactive, complete
personal and professional commitment.
(Bryce 2003: 6)

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Introduction
All students writing a research thesis face the new challenge of having to man-
age large amounts of text across a lengthy period of time; 80,000 words is the
typical length of a doctoral thesis in Britain or Australia. Prior’s (1998) in-depth
study of graduate students writing within their disciplines clearly demonstrates
that even successful students struggle with writing at an advanced level; it is
both quantitatively and qualitatively a different task to their previous experi-
ences of academic writing. This challenge is heightened for the second-language
speaker as they may struggle simultaneously in several domains, all of which
have been identified as influencing academic writing at an advanced level. This
chapter discusses four clusters of issues which can directly impact on the second-
language-speaker writing a thesis in English. We have grouped them under four
headings and will examine each of these in turn. They are:
●
psycho-affective issues;
●
behavioural issues;
●
rhetorical issues (how language and the conventions of thesis writing are
used to persuade the reader of the validity of the writer’s arguments);
●
social issues.
While these four factors may impact on the native-English-speaking thesis
writer, it is their intensity and co-occurrence in combination with limited
linguistic resources in English which may make the second-language thesis
writer’s task and, therefore, the supervisor’s task, more arduous. To what
extent are these factors part of the supervisor’s brief? They may not directly
appear to be but, if unacknowledged, may be contributing to either a lack of
progress or failure to complete.