When doctoral students can’t develop their writing skills: What helps?

Tags

feedback on writing, supervisor feedback, talking about writing, writing skills development

By Susan Carter

The question in the title is not rhetorical: this post is keen to receive suggestions from both doctoral students and academics on how to help doctoral students learn to control their academic writing.

Here’s an example: explaining the mechanics of writing proved hard in a recent peer review group with one woman who just didn’t get it. Each meeting, she found others’ writing ‘really good’, while agreeing that the formative feedback on her own writing really improved it. Why couldn’t she learn how to give good feedback from receiving helpful feedback on her own work? Why didn’t this help her learn to self review?

This woman was highly intelligent; as such, she trusted her own evaluation that she simply was never going to become good at academic writing. She had tried other writing support before attending our classes. Her writing hadn’t improved, mostly because the instruction didn’t make sense to her. She was sure that she could never write well enough to be published.

After the class, as facilitators we did a post mortem. Could we have managed this better as teachers? We considered whether it was an advantage or disadvantage that the group was small. It had worked well for the others; one student celebrated that understanding the ‘formula’ for a paragraph had enabled her to write more fluidly and produce clearer writing—she rocketed ahead. Others made break-throughs too. That others seemed to be moving ahead happily probably made it worse for this sharp-witted student who seemed unable to revise her own writing.

I have also heard from supervisors who bemoan the fact that, although they try to explain the notion of logical forward progression, the need for a narrative, and for connections, some students continue to lack a sense of how writing structure affects meaning. As a learning advisor, I spend hundreds of hours with students on the other side of the conversation who find supervisor feedback puzzling. (Difficulty may be often due to communication between two people who interpret things differently.) My own approaches include the following:

• always give feedback first on content and then on mechanics;
• praise what works well, dissecting why;
• compare what is not working to what is (‘you do this well over here’);
• scaffold support with English language, not too much at once;
• work with one section and request that the same principle be applied throughout;
• direct students to other resources, e.g., learning centres, guides, digital resources;
• keep exemplars that can be used as models;
• ask students to look for well-written articles and explain why they enjoyed the style;
• explain with metaphors to make writing revision less emotional, more practical;
• set up peer review groups.

Usually, this combination, adapted to suit the situation, keeps my research students progressing in their control of writing—and as I work through these approaches with them, I’m often alerted myself to ways I could write more strongly.

Yet, I am aware from the student in my writing class that some very clued up people simply don’t connect to the workings of language in formal academic prose. Are there alternative ways to explain the points about academic writing that would help someone who really has trouble with language mechanics?

If you are a student, or have a student, with a story that goes “Did not get it until…” I would love to hear from you. Stories could be pastiched together for a sequel post: suggestions based on student experience.

Doing feedback: from zeal to anguish

Tags

feedback and emotions, Giving feedback, pedagogies for effective feedback, supervisor feedback

Associate Professor Sara Cotterall  completed her doctorate in the field of doctoral education in 2011 after a 25 year academic career teaching and researching language education.  One of the publications from her PhD was the fabulous article ‘More than just a brain: Emotions and the doctoral experience’. She revisits some of those themes – albeit from a different perspective – in this blog she’s scribed for us.

Sara dedicates this post to David Hall, “my generous and witty PhD supervisor, who passed away February 3, 2014 in Sydney, Australia.”

“It’s hard for me too!” – I think, whenever I hear doctoral candidates angsting about their supervisors’ feedback.  I find it infinitely more difficult to give feedback on doctoral researchers’ work than it ever was to receive.  Why? Because I am acutely aware of the power of the feedback to disappoint, discourage or depress the recipient.

Feedback stirs up a range of emotions.  Many doctoral students tell horror stories about their supervisors’ feedback practices.  They complain that feedback is late, contradictory, difficult to understand or discouraging. Take the supervisor who repeatedly told a PhD candidate that what he had written was ‘bullshit’ and that he shouldn’t come back until he had ‘an original idea’.  With feedback on doctoral writing, the stakes are high, time is short and emotions are raw. However, PhD researchers seldom reveal those emotions to their supervisors (Cotterall, 2013); instead they share them elsewhere.

Emotions that have been held in check tend to spill over when PhD candidates congregate — feelings of anxiety, resentment, impatience, discouragement, dissatisfaction — but rarely feelings of joy. Sadly, the more positive emotions seem to be quarantined until submission day. During my days as a PhD student our monthly seminars were followed by a shared student lunch where the real issues bothering people always got an airing.  Like the time a colleague from China told me she’d been waiting three months for her supervisor to return her draft chapter and wondered if such a delay was normal.  When I offered to draft a respectful email for her to send her supervisor, she refused, explaining that she didn’t want to jeopardize her chances of getting a recommendation letter from him.

But PhD candidates are not the only ones to experience emotions during the feedback process. When I’m giving feedback on my doctoral researchers’ writing, I agonize over the words I use, producing several drafts and modifying my comments until the last minute. I know how much the wrong word can sting.  This is particularly the case when working with researchers whose first language is not English where nuances of meaning can be ‘lost in translation’. I worry that my feedback will discourage, yet I also want to provide guidance that will help make their next draft communicate better.  At other times I have to check my disappointment when I see that suggestions made previously have not been acted on and the draft remains weak.

Some comments, such as one about the importance of ‘metatext’ (Paltridge & Starfield, 2007) that I wrote on a student’s chapter draft recently, need explaining and the written document is not the most efficient site for that.  The same is true of my observation that a student was depending too heavily on her sources in her literature review without showing how the other ‘voices’ in her text are those of “guests” she has invited to her research “dinner party” (Kamler &  Thomson, 2006).  These kinds of ideas need to be explained, illustrated and discussed. But time constraints mean this doesn’t always happen.

Given these tensions, I can’t help feeling that everything would be simpler if written feedback could be replaced with oral sessions where supervisor and candidate sit side by side working with the text (where supervisor and student are located in the same city).  This would foreground the supervisor’s mentor, teacher and helper roles and downplay their role as gatekeeper.  I suspect that good supervisors (the type who publish on the pedagogy of supervision and contribute to blogs like this) adopt such feedback practices routinely, but there are many who don’t.

Face-to-face feedback has enormous potential, if only the practical issues could be resolved. Given the long-term nature of the relationship between doctoral supervisor and doctoral researcher, I believe it can afford to be more honest.  This means that if it is necessary to comment negatively on something the student has written, the feedback is more likely to be viewed as helpful.

So can the practical problems be solved?  The most efficient way for me to work with a student’s (often lengthy) text would be for the candidate to be physically present while I was reading the draft, so that instead of having to commit my comments to paper, I could talk them through as I went. But since I do most of this kind of reading at home in the evening after work, this is not practicable. What’s more, few doctoral researchers would wish to sit there while their supervisor worked through their draft in real time.

What do others think?  Could/do face-to-face feedback sessions offer a richer environment for talking formatively about text?  Might this diffuse some of the sting of receiving written feedback on drafts?  If so, how could such sessions be set up?  And what other options are available? 

References

Cotterall, S. (2013). More than just a brain: Emotions and the doctoral experience. Higher Education Research & Development, 32(2), 174-187.

Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2006). Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision. London: Routledge.

Paltridge, B., & Starfield, S. (2007). Thesis and dissertation writing in a second language: A handbook for supervisors. London: Routledge.

Feedback in doctoral writing: Why is it so different?

Tags

Giving and receiving feedback, supervisor feedback

Welcome to our Feedback Month – for the next few weeks our blog will explore different aspects of feedback on doctoral student writing.  You can receive notification of new posts by pressing the ‘Follow’ tab. We hope you enjoy our first themed month.

By Claire Aitchison

In workshops on feedback I often ask participants to share memorable experiences as givers or receivers of feedback – and boy, have I heard some beauties! Rarely is anyone stuck for something to say, and groups often recoil in shock and laughter as individuals tell their tales. One of my favourite stories comes from a very senior academic colleague who recounted how her doctoral supervisor scrawled all over her near-to-final thesis – ‘Total rubbish!’ ‘Crap!’ ‘Nowhere near ready for submission’ – and so on. After she had recovered from the shock, she consulted with her co-supervisor, decided to ignore the feedback and submitted. She was rewarded with brilliant PhD examiner reports. Stories of bad experiences proliferate; however, there are also wonderful examples of timely, rewarding, satisfying feedback.

No doubt you can tell your own good story – please do. (Be sure to let us know clearly if you want your identity withheld.)

There’s a tonne of information about the emotional, ontological, epistemological and practice dimensions of feedback in higher education (I’ve put some references below). I don’t intend to rehearse those here, but rather I wish to consider what might be particular to feedback on doctoral writing within the student-supervisory relationship.

In an undergraduate context, the tasks, learning goals and assessment criteria are clearly outlined and student and teacher roles more stable, better defined. Feedback occurs when teachers mark student writing, grading it with commentary. For most undergraduates, their primary relationship is with other students; they may have little or no relationship with their teacher marker.

By contrast, in doctoral study the relationship between student and teacher (supervisor) is all-important and often mediated, perhaps even defined, through the processes of giving and receiving feedback on submitted writing. In some cases, doctoral candidates and their supervisors only ever meet in order to discuss the candidate’s progress as monitored and measured through the student’s writing.

Doctoral feedback is unique because it is nested within a set of intimate relationships where relational connections and responsibilities may be ill-defined, and are set to alter over time. Furthermore, this dynamic situation is overlaid by institutional and disciplinary norms, practices and expectations. Oh, and of course, there’s the personal dimension. Individual styles and personality differences infuse and at times can override everything else, and yet, this interrelationship must be sustained – for years. Now, that certainly makes for a high stakes environment!

One of the outcomes of this complex social arrangement is that the whole process of giving and receiving feedback on student writing can carry with it the heavy and additional burden of this interplay of power, responsibility and personality. It goes without saying that soliciting, giving and receiving feedback is difficult anyway, but when this involves changing responsibilities and expectations, additional strains are placed on what is already an emotional space.

Add panel supervision to the mix and there’s potential for a myriad of additional tricky situations requiring high levels of sensitivity and good will, and sophisticated negotiating skills. There’s rarely a single, simple fix to the kinds of issues that arise, but sometimes it helps to think through the possibilities. For example, what would you do in these situations?

What if a student prioritises the feedback of one supervisor over the other – especially if the principal supervisor’s feedback is ignored? How should supervisors act when they hold different views about a student’s work? Should supervisors make allowances when their student feels more humiliated in panel feedback sessions than in private one-on-one meetings? Should supervisors make their disagreements known in front of the student? What if it is one of the supervisors who is the wayward party – guilty of returning work late, cancelling supervision meetings, or giving poor feedback? What if the student regularly fails to submit work, or to act on the feedback? Should co-supervisors be expected to be familiar with the feedback given by other panel members?

Some references

Aitchison, C. and Mowbray, S. (2013). PhD women: Managing emotions, managing doctoral studies Teaching in Higher Education 18 (8), 859-870.

Can, G. and Walker, A. (2011) ‘A model for doctoral students’ perceptions and attitudes toward written feedback for academic writing’, Research in Higher Education, 52(5): 508–536.

Carless, D., Salter, D., Yang, M. and Lam, J. (2011). ‘Developing sustainable feedback practices’, Studies in Higher Education, 36(4): 395–407.

Cotterall, S. (2013). More than just a brain: Emotions and the doctoral experience. Higher Education Research and Development. 32(2), 174-187.  

Guerin, C. & Green, I. (2013) “They’re the bosses”: Feedback in team supervision. Journal of Higher and Further Education.

Paré, A. (2011) Speaking of writing: Supervisory feedback and the dissertation. In Doctoral education: research-based strategies for doctoral students, supervisors and administrators, edited by L. McAlpine & C. Amundsen, 59 – 74. New York: Springer.

Stracke, E. & Kumar, V. (2010) ‘Feedback and self-regulated learning: insights from supervisors’ and PhD examiners’ reports’, Reflective Practice: International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives, 11 (1) 17–30.

Sutton, P. (2012) Conceptualizing feedback literacy: knowing, being, and acting, Innovations in education and teaching international 49 (1) 31-40.

Disembodied feedback on writing

Tags

disembodiment, supervisor feedback, talking about writing, written feedback

by Cally Guerin

I’ve been thinking lately about the challenges of providing feedback on writing for remote doctoral students (that is, students who do not work on the same campus as their supervisors). While I’m a fervent believer in the importance of face-to-face discussion about writing, there are lots of situations where this is simply not possible, because the student is away from the university gathering data during a field trip, the supervisor is travelling for conferences or study leave, or the candidate is enrolled as a remote student and always needs to receive feedback online. In these situations, how do we optimize the feedback that students receive?

These thoughts have been sparked by an interest in coming to grips with what is lost in the disembodiment that comes with much online technology. I became acutely aware of this recently when writing blind peer review for journal articles, a situation in which communication about the document is only in writing, with no follow-up verbal discussion.

Obviously the relationship between an author and reviewer is somewhat different from that between students and their supervisors – unlike blind review, students have an existing relationship with supervisors that has been built up over time, and ideally all parties have worked together on the research from its inception, so that the feedback is contextualised. But there are also important parallels between peer review and supervisors’ written feedback, as Aitchison points out (forthcoming, 2014). Indeed, with the increasing focus on theses by publication, it may well be a doctoral student receiving that peer review on a journal article.

Any comments on writing must always be framed respectfully in both blind review and in supervision relationships – that goes without saying – and constructive critique needs to be delivered in encouraging, positive and helpful terms. But perhaps the main difference is that supervisors have a greater responsibility to nurture and pass on knowledge about writing to their students, to develop writing skills as part of the doctoral education. Students can reasonably expect to be given advice on their writing that is new to early career researchers; the same advice in peer review might be perceived as inappropriately patronizing to a colleague who has many years experience in the field.

However, just like peer review, supervisor feedback on writing has the potential to be misunderstood. If students receive only written feedback on their drafts, some of the information that is communicated might not easily include the nuances that come along with an enthusiastic nod, or a slight tilt of the head to indicate uncertainty. Face-to-face discussion also allows the supervisor to respond immediately to the student’s body language as they receive the feedback, providing opportunities to ascertain whether the student has understood the explanation, perhaps even whether they are hurt or confused by critical comments. I’m not suggesting here that words are inadequate – far from it – but that feedback is such a tricky and subtle part of the doctoral process that can easily be disrupted. Great care is required if the primary form of feedback is to be in writing.

Video feedback on writing and follow-up conversations on Skype or Facetime can go a long way to mitigating any possible miscommunications. Our embodied selves communicate so much through tone of voice and body language. The two-way discussion of writing allows space to ask questions for clarification, to argue the case for not following supervisory advice, and to clarify the rationale for writing choices. The to and fro of discussing the initial written feedback as part of the ‘learning conversations’ (Wisker et al. 2003; East, Bitchener & Basturkmen 2012) seems to be an essential part of developing the thinking expressed in the writing.

Have you managed to provide effective feedback for remote doctoral students that overcomes the challenges of not being there in person? If you are a doctoral student mostly reliant on written feedback, do you have any suggestions about how to make this as effective as possible? What strategies have you discovered that work well?

 

References

Aitchison, C. (forthcoming, 2014). Learning from multiple voices: Feedback and authority in doctoral writing groups. In C. Aitchison & C. Guerin (eds), Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond: Innovations in Practice and Theory, Abingdon: Routledge.

East, M., Bitchener, J., & Basturkmen, H. (2012). What constitutes effective feedback to postgraduate research students? The students’ perspective, Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 9(2).

Wisker, G., Robinson, G., Trafford, V., Warnes, M. & Creighton, E. (2003).  From Supervisory Dialogues to Successful PhDs: Strategies supporting and enabling the learning conversations of staff and students at postgraduate level, Teaching in Higher Education 8(3): 383-397.

A question of language competence or writing style?

Tags

academic literacies, Doctoral writing, English language writing skills, generation 1.5, supervisor feedback

By Cally Guerin

Last week a student came to me in tears, distraught at what she felt was a very unfair assessment of her writing ability after her supervisor had decided her English was not up to scratch. She is from an Asian background, and was born and educated in Australia. While English might not be her first language or ‘mother tongue’, she is certainly not using English as an Additional Language (EAL), as the current terminology has it. (It used to be English as a Second Language, ESL, and may be moving on to English as an International Language, EIL – all of which depends on the context and perhaps the current fashions in the field.) Our universities have plenty of ‘Generation 1.5’ PhD students like her who work and think in more than one language.

Putting the labels aside, the young woman is also typical of many students who have come through the Australian school system, and is a reasonably competent writer with room for improvement – which is what one might say of at least 90% of PhD students. As academic developers we see lots of students who can write grammatically correct sentences (at least most of the time), can more or less communicate their ideas, but don’t produce particularly elegant prose. My assessment of this student’s work was that her writing fell into this category, rather than being about her language background. And perhaps she does, therefore, need some guidance in developing the academic literacies necessary for doctoral writing.

The situation has several perspectives. How can students respond to supervisors who seem to be very harsh on their writing, imposing their own personal preferences and calling it ‘an English language issue’? Most students are sharply aware of the power supervisors have over them; nonetheless, it can be frustrating to feel you have to impersonate your supervisor’s style. How do supervisors judge ethically when to insist that writing should be altered, and when they should back off and accept that it is not their own writing and doesn’t need to be in their voice? And where should thesis examiners draw the line concerning style, voice and accuracy? (Or, for that matter, journal reviewers who seem to have very specific ideas about what is ‘correct’ – but that is another story!). Is it necessary to set the highest standards right from the start? Could that be too discouraging for students, or does it prepare them for what lies ahead in the academic world? Where does reasonable academic rigour end and pettiness – that could even be construed as racist – begin?

My own experience working as an academic editor has been useful in encouraging me to think carefully about the difference between something that is incorrect, and something that is simply a matter of style. I do think that supervisors have a responsibility to help students learn the specific writing conventions of their individual disciplines, and I readily acknowledge that certain vocabulary can have vastly different connotations in particular areas. Nevertheless, it’s also important to notice what is actually right in someone’s writing, what is being achieved, what is a surface issue and what is genuinely problematic.

And feedback needs to be specific to be useful. To label all writing issues as ‘English language problems’ seems to me to be particularly unhelpful in developing writing skills for doctoral students. Many students take time to learn the disciplinary vocabulary of a new field and the accompanying conventions of research communication in their area. The language of the discipline itself can be very foreign for researchers grappling with the details of unfamiliar sub-disciplines, regardless of their own language background! Acquiring academic literacy often requires specific training at all levels of education.

Are you a Generation 1.5 doctoral student, a learning advisor who recognizes this story as a familiar one, or a supervisor of such students? How has this played out in your experience? Is it common to misunderstand these aspects of academic writing? I’d love to hear your stories about how students in similar situations have negotiated expectations about language and writing in the academic setting, how they have developed the required academic literacies, what strategies have proved useful, and what the pitfalls might be.