Doctoral writing: Are you ready to unlearn what you have learnt?

Tags

English language writing skills, research writing, thesis writing, writing skills development

By Trang Thu Thi Nguyen, a doctoral candidate in her third year at the University of Auckland. Trang presented these thoughts as a conference paper at the Higher Education Research Development Society Conference (July 205, 2019, Auckland), highlighting one challenge for international doctoral students writing in English as an Additional Language. 

The international language test IELTS (International English Language Testing System) has become part of the educational scene in many countries, particularly when it is an internationally recognized test for admission to university education.

In Vietnam, IELTS was first introduced about 20 years ago and it fitted in quite smoothly with the country’s exam-oriented educational system. Since then, as the importance of English for a globalized world has been recognized, the popularity of IELTS has continued increasing. IELTS-oriented language training has become a big business. A large number of private language centres offer IELTS preparation courses as part of their English training programs to meet the demands of a growing number of Vietnamese students who want to undertake tertiary study in English-speaking countries.

In the university sector, some language education institutions have set an IELTS score of 6.5 as a graduation requirement for English-majored students. For example, this is the usual standard required in Australian universities now. The test’s washback impact on English Language Teaching in the Vietnamese context is quite visible. IELTS preparation has been integrated into extended academic writing programs for English-majored students. English instructors have referred to types of IELTS essays to devise academic writing syllabi. After the IELTS writing rubrics were publicized recently, its band descriptors have become a guideline that helps English teachers shape their instruction. It is thought that the rubrics represent examiners’ expectations and aligning instruction with the rubrics would help students achieve high scores in the IELTS academic module writing tests.

But I propose that the test is limited as an indicator of preparedness for doctoral study. In their research of into IELTS preparation in New Zealand, Read and Hayes (2003) discovered teachers’ reservations about IELTS. Teachers in this study were concerned that students who passed IELTS with band scores of 6.0 or 6.5 may still be poorly prepared for writing demands in Anglophone academic cultures. The band scores, whether global or analytical, were seen as problematic. Researchers argue that the complex features of writing cannot be reduced to narrow descriptions of a single rubric (Storch, 2009, p.106). The opinionated feature of IELTS writing seems to contradict guides for university academic writing (Moore & Morton, 2007, p.198). Doctoral writing requires critical analysis of literature and arguments which demonstrate theoretical savvy. The authenticity of IELTS writing tasks is, therefore, questionable.

I would like to extend the cautious perspectives towards IELTS with my personal observations. The chance to immerse myself in the academic culture of doctoral writing has prompted me to recognize that there are divergences between my previous IELTS-based writing training and what writing experts suggest for academic writing. I want to illustrate such divergences with concrete sentence-level examples.

When I studied IELTS writing tasks, I was advised to frequently use linking words. As instructed on an IELTS training website, “the examiner needs to see a range of linking words in your essay to award you a high score for the criterion of ‘Coherence and Cohesion’ which is 25% of your mark”. But, in fact, linking words are not employed as frequently in academic writing as I used to think. Ideas are internally linked to each other. The internal link is created by the logicality of flow. It does not need to be explicitly displayed by connectors. While connectors are useful, an over-supply may interrupt fluidity (Hinkel, 2003).

What was encouraged in my previous academic writing training was the extensive use of complex sentences. We were provided with what was called “a golden rule” for IELTS writing. The rule says that “if there are 12 sentences in an essay, 2 sentences are simple sentences, 3 are compound sentences and the rest are complex sentences”. These ideas are not totally applicable to doctoral writing. Long sentences sometime lack clarity and cause readers to get lost. Short sentences may be more powerful in some cases, particularly in delivering emphasis (Carter, personal communication, November 26^th, 2018). In fact, when to use simple or complex sentences depends on rhetorical purposes.A combination of different sentence types would be desirable.

Using passive voice is not as highly recommended as I had thought. When I did writing courses in Vietnam, I was fed the idea that English was characterized by the high frequency of passive voice in written discourse. English instructors provided exercises and tests which required learners to change active sentences into passive sentences. The drill of transforming active sentences into passive sentences created a false impression that passive sentences are more appropriate in academic writing than active sentences. Why didn’t they ask learners to make changes in the reverse direction? As Sword (2007) comments, we want to make our academic writing have life instead of existing as the living dead—see her TED talk on “zombie nouns”. Active verbs and active voice energize our writing. Too many “to be” verbs would turn our writing into static prose.

The above divergences may have little to do with the IELTS writing test itself but more with the Vietnamese teachers’ interpretation of the test and its assessment criteria which in turn impacted their instruction. However, instruction which is test-oriented and aims at helping students to pass the IELTS test only may end up teaching students writing habits that are not useful. Though IELTS writing tasks are a good start for academic writing training, it is essential to raise awareness that the power of the test in preparing students to postgraduate academic writing should be interpreted with caution. Language teachers should not let IELTS dominate their instruction. As for students, “passing” an IELTS test does not necessarily lead to success in academic writing tasks at the tertiary level in general and doctoral level in particular. Old habits die hard but it is necessary sometimes to unlearn what has been learnt.

References

Moore, T. & Morton, J. (2007). Authenticity in the IELTS Academic Module Writing Test: A comparative study of Task 2 Items and University Assignments. In L.B.Taylor & P.Falvey (Eds.), IELTS collected papers: Research in speaking and writing assessment (pp.197-248). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Read, J. & Hayes, B. (2003). The impact of IELTS on preparation for academic study in New Zealand. In T. Robyn (Ed.), International English Language Testing System (IELTS) Research Reports 2003 (pp.153-191). Canberra: IDP.

Hinkel, E. (2003). Adverbial markers and tone of L1 and L2 students’ writing. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(7). 1049-1068.

Storch, N. (2009). The impact of studying in a second language (L2) medium university on the development of L2 writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 18, 103-118.

Sword, H. (2007). The Writer’s Diet. New Zealand: Pearson.

Sword, H. (no date) Beware of nominalizations (AKA zombie nouns). Available at https://ed.ted.com/lessons/beware-of-nominalizations-aka-zombie-nouns-helen-sword

 

 

 

 

Internal alignment in doctoral writing: questions, methods, theory….

Tags

research writing, thesis structure, thesis writing

By Susan Carter

I’m writing this as I prepare a two-hour workshop for a group of doctoral students who mostly work in Education. Our thinking work together will be premised upon an article that I have just read (Twining, Heller, Nussbaum, and Tsai, 2017). If you are able to access this, you’ll have a good resource for doctoral students, who often have difficulty with how they are expected to write about their study’s epistemology and ontology.

I’ve sent this article in advance to the students who’ll be coming to my class, since it devotes a few paragraph to the need for ‘internal alignment’ in research writing. If you cannot access the article, it would still be possible to run a workshop in which doctoral students talk about how their research design links to their epistemological position, and how the bits of their thesis tie logically together within that framework.

Tracking research

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Excel, recording progress, thesis writing

Dr Abigail Winter is a transdisciplinary independent scholar, whose day job is working at the Information Coordinator in QUT’s Reporting and Analysis section. Her research interests vary broadly around the higher education sector, including organisational change management, journalism, student employability, research methods, and teaching and learning. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK) and can be contacted at a.winter@qut.edu.au. Susan Gasson is the Manager of the Research Students’ Centre at QUT. She writes on research methods and HDR issues, including student mobility and internationalisation, and is currently planning her own doctoral research project. In this post they write about their use of Excel to track research writing and reading.

By Abigail Winter and Susan Gasson

I began 2016, as so many previous years, with the intention of becoming more productive. As a bibliophile since the age of about 4 years old, my first place to go was therefore the university library – a haven of wonderful ideas in print form. And, quite literally, a gold mine of brilliance in this case. I found Paul Silvia’s How to write a lot, and devoured it in less than 24 hours, then bought a copy for myself. And it prompted the scheduler that Susan Gasson kindly presented at this year’s Doctoral Writing SIG meeting.

In an almost throw-away fashion, Silvia mentions that he uses a simple database to track his writing each day, as one of his strategies for writing a lot. I took the idea and started by tracking my reading (because that was all I had done for the first fortnight of the year – no writing at that point).

Leading By Exemplar: The benefits of asking good questions about other people’s writing

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analysing thesis writing, teaching writing, thesis writing, thesis writing manuals, writing skills

Robert B. (Rob) Desjardins, PhD, is the graduate writing advisor at the Student Success Centre, University of Alberta (Canada). Here he explains his insights into how best to help doctoral writers learn about research writing.

By Robert B. Desjardins

Lately I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a new manual for students struggling to craft theses and dissertations. The working title – still in the “playful conceit” stage – is The Incomplete Guide to Thesis-Writing.

Why “incomplete”? It’s a riff on the dangers of authorial hubris, and on the need for writing advice that helps students to start their critical work, rather than promising an easy path to the end. It’s also a tribute to the pedagogical value of the question – a speech act that sets writers on an unpredictable path, making them responsible to define and then contend with the rhetorical problems that a major writing project presents.

Doctoral writing and decision-making in the first few months

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feedback on writing, research questions, thesis writing

By Susan Carter

I’m working with a promising new doctoral student and conversations are mainly around scoping her project. I’ll call her Angel, although she has kept her Chinese name. Our talk circles round the decisions that need to be made in the first year, and preferably in the first few months. It’s a process of thinking, choosing and writing. First, decisions are approached at several different levels.

We begin with identifying the problem that is driving the research. I want her to write that clearly. This leads to how her doctoral project might produce better understanding the problem with a goal to mitigating it. One set of considerations hovering through our talk regards methods and methodology.

What’s the formula for writing a thesis?

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CaRS, IMRAD, thesis formula, thesis writing

by Cally Guerin

Sometimes it seems that doctoral students attend workshops on thesis writing because they are seeking a nice, neat formula to follow. The primary question they want answered is: ‘What’s correct?’ Given all the other pressures on them – to finish on time, to be original, to get research published, etc., etc. – it’s easy to understand the desire to have a simple, straightforward set of rules to follow that will please examiners and journal editors alike. Part of the writing teacher’s job seems to be letting them down softly and helping them realize that it can never be that simple. The route to thesis submission always demands more complicated decision-making along the way; even more challenging, the environment in which those submissions occur is changing rapidly in unpredictable ways.

There is some comfort for those seeking these kinds of formulaic answers, however, in the traditional IMRAD structure of scientific articles: Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, and Discussion. Unfortunately, this neat acronym neglects to mention the Abstract and Reference sections. And then, the apparently neat separation between different sections turns out to be rather messier for many researchers – is it okay to include some discussion in the Materials and Methods to explain why a non-standard procedure was adopted? Is there always a clear cut-off between Results and Analysis/Discussion if I’m reporting on qualitative research that has already been analysed in order to create some broad organizing themes? If you find yourself looking for useful strategies to work through such complex issues, try Carter, Kelly and Brailsford’s (2012) book, Structuring your research thesis.

Also very popular amongst those looking for instruction is the ‘moves’ approach developed by John Swales and Christine Feak (1996; 2004), otherwise known as the CaRS model (Create a Research Space). This model illuminates the reasoning behind Introductions in research and includes three main moves or positionings: establish a research territory (and make a case for why it matters); establish a niche (and point out a gap in the field); and occupy that niche (by explaining exactly what this new research will add to the field). These ‘moves’ or opening gambits do, of course, work very well in lots of ways, and should not be underestimated as a means to engage readers and demonstrate the value of the research. This approach has been picked up and developed further by many since (see, for example, Cargill & O’Connor 2009; Paltridge and Starfield 2007).

The structures mentioned above provide very useful guidance for novice writers, but will never be enough in doctoral writing. A thesis requires much more nuanced negotiation of the conventions of the discipline. In relation to this, I was greatly heartened to hear Anne Freadman speaking at the Writing Research Across Borders (WRAB) conference recently. Freadman, the doyenne of genre theory, is working at an enviably complex level. I can’t hope to capture the subtleties of her argument here, but one valuable message I took from her presentation was that, basically, writers need to conform to the ‘generic form’ only sufficiently for readers to recognize where their work fits in with the conventions and expectations of genre – they do not need to slavishly imitate or repeat that genre. The real achievement, it would seem, is for doctoral writers to find a balance between what they want to say and the conventions of their discipline that works well enough to communicate precisely the message they aim for. This is always a matter of judgement and can’t be dictated by adherence to strict rules.

Have you found yourself faced with doctoral students who seek easy answers? Or are you a doctoral candidate struggling with the same concerns? What other advice would you offer those trying to find their way through these questions?

Cargill, M. & O’Connor, P. (2009). Writing scientific research articles: Strategy and steps. Oxford UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Carter, S., Kelly, F. & Brailsford, I. (2012). Structuring your research thesis. Houndsmills UK: Palgrave MacMillan.

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

Swales, J.M. & Feak, C.B. (1996; 2004). Academic writing for graduate students. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.