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

Introduction

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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.