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

A review of thesis and dissertation types
Nearly all of the literature on thesis and dissertation writing consists of hand-
books and guides with, apart from a few notable exceptions, very little
analysis having been carried out of actual texts. Atkinson (1997) suggests a
number of reasons why this might be the case. The first of these is the acces-
sibility of the texts; that is, theses and dissertations are often difficult to
obtain in university libraries, and even more difficult to obtain from outside a
university. It is only recently that they have come to be available electroni-
cally via online databases (see Chapter 12). Another difficulty is the sheer size
of theses and dissertations as texts for analysis. This often limits what
researchers can observe as well as the number of texts they are able to analyse.
Further, there is often considerable variation in expectations across disciplines
and fields of study (and indeed supervisors) in terms of what a thesis or dis-
sertation should look like (Dudley-Evans 1993, 1999; Thompson 1999).
A further problem is that theses and dissertations in some areas of study are
changing. For example, a thesis or dissertation written in certain areas of
study may now be very different from one that might have been written ten
or more years ago, particularly with the influence of what Hodge (1998: 113)
Chapter 5