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

The setting of the students’ text
The setting of the student’s text includes the kind of university and level of
study the thesis or dissertation is being written in. This may be a comprehen-
sive research university, or it may be a university of technology where
different sorts of work and different sorts of research projects might be more
especially valued. The thesis or dissertation may be being written for an
Introduction
3

---

honours, a master’s, or a doctoral degree. This has implications for the
breadth and scale of the student’s research project.
Another important issue is the kind of study area the student’s text is being
written in; that is, whether it is written in what Becher and Trowler (2001)
call a ‘hard’ or a ‘soft’ discipline, a ‘pure’ or ‘applied’ discipline, or a ‘conver-
gent’ or ‘divergent’ area of study. This has important implications for
understanding the values, ideologies and research perspectives that are priori-
tized in the students’ area/s of study. Students can be asked, for example, to
consider whether academic staff in their area of study share the same basic ide-
ologies, judgments and values (a convergent area of study) or whether their
research perspectives are drawn from other areas of study (a divergent area of
study). They might consider whether there is more variation in what might be
considered ‘research’ in their particular area of study, and to what extent this
makes a difference as to what students can ‘say’ and do. This discussion helps
students to place their dissertation in its particular academic setting as well as
to bring to the fore the sets of values that hold in their area of study that might
be shared by members of academic staff, but not openly expressed by them.