Sue Starfield

Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language : A Handbook for Supervisors

1. The Background to Thesis and Dissertation Writing 2. The Research Process 3. Working with Non-Native Speaker Students 4. Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language 5. Writing a Research Proposal 6. The Overall Shape of Theses and Dissertations 7. Writing the Introduction 8. Writing the Background Chapters 9. Writing the Methodology Chapter 10. Writing the Results Chapters 11. Writing the Discussion Chapters 12. Writing the Concluding Chapter 13. Writing the Abstract and Acknowledgements Sections 14. Resources for Thesis and Dissertation Writing

Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts: two ends of a continuum

Doctoral degrees in the visual and performing arts are a fairly recent entrant in the research higher degree landscape in Australian universities. At the same time, a new kind of doctorate is evolving, a doctorate in which significant aspects of the claim for the doctoral characteristics of originality, mastery and contribution to the field are demonstrated through an original creative work. A substantial written contextualization is also generally required to clarify the basis of these claims. Managing the relationship between the written and creative components is a challenge for students and supervisors. The study reported on in this article examined the nature of the written component of doctoral degrees in the visual and performing arts submitted for examination in Australian universities, as well as the range of practices and trends in the kinds of texts that are presented in doctoral submissions in these areas of study. The study included a nation-wide survey of doctoral offerings in the visual and performing arts, the collection of a set of ‘high quality’ doctoral texts, and interviews with doctoral students and supervisors. This article reports on two doctoral projects that can be seen to represent opposite ends of a continuum in the set of doctoral works that were examined.

New Directions in Student Academic Writing

Recent research into student academic writing adopts an academic literacies approach in which writing is no longer viewed as a generic skill to be taught as a set of static rules but rather as shaped by complex interactions of social, institutional, and historical forces in contexts of unequal power. This chapter reviews research into student academic writing in Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, identifying how students and teachers negotiate academic literacies within specific local contexts. The key themes discussed are the changing notion of understandings of the concept of discourse community in academic writing; the significance of the interrelationship between intertextuality and plagiarism; and the increasing significance attributed to the role writer identity plays in academic writing. The pedagogical implications and potentialities of the academic literacies approach is considered and avenues for further exploration, particularly those that involve greater engagement of academic literacy practitioners and disciplinary specialists, are briefly examined.

Extending the notion of ‘text’: the visual and performing arts doctoral thesis

Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts poses many challenges for the academy, not the least of which is accounting for the possible relations which can hold between the written and creative/performed components of a doctoral thesis in these fields. This article proposes that the interrelations between the two components in doctoral submissions of this kind can be theorized as being on a continuum of interrelations, with a number of key text types (or archetypes) being manifested. Through textual analysis of the written component only, the different possible relations can be distinguished through the ways in which the creative component is resemiotized in the written text, through both the verbal and visual semiosis of the written component. This enables us to identify a number of ways in which the ‘one’ project can be construed through its two different component parts, casting an important light on debates within the field in terms of the relations between creative practice and research.

Researching academic writing: What textography affords

Abstract This chapter discusses textography as a strategy for researching academic writing in higher education. Textography is an approach to the analysis of written texts which combines text analysis with ethnographic techniques, such as surveys, interviews and other data sources, in order to examine what texts are like, and why. It aims to provide a more contextualized basis for understanding students’ writing in the social, cultural and institutional settings in which it takes place than might be obtained by looking solely at students’ texts. Through discussion of the outcomes of a textography, which examined the written texts submitted by visual and performing arts doctoral students at a number of Australian universities, we reflect on what we learnt from the study that we could not have known by looking at the texts alone. If we had looked at the texts without the ethnographic data not only are there many things we would not have known, but many of the things we might have said would likely have been right off the mark. Equally, had we just had the ethnographic data without the text analysis, we would have missed the insights provided by the explicit text analysis. The textography enabled us to see the diversity of practices across fields of study and institutions as well as gain an understanding of why this might be the case, all of which is of benefit to student writers and their supervisors.

Taking Back the Future: Identity Construction, Power, and Critical Pedagogy

Negotiating Identities: Education for Empowerment in a Diverse Society.: Jim Cummins Two Languages at Work: Bilingual Life on the Factory Floor.: Tara Goldstein Critical Pedagogy: Notes From the Real World.: Joan Wink

Exploring Doctoral Examiner Judgements Through the Lenses of Habermas and Epistemic Cognition

Abstract Evaluation of research is a core function of academic work, yet there has been very little theoretical development about what it means to ‘know’ in relation to judgements made in examination of doctoral research. This chapter addresses the issue by reflecting on findings from three projects aimed at enhancing understanding of doctoral examination. In order to progress understanding about knowledge judgements in the doctoral research context, the chapter draws on two key contributions in the field of knowledge and knowing, namely, Habermas’ cognitive interests and Chinn, Buckland and Samarapungavan’s notion of epistemic cognition. It examines the common ground between the two bodies of theory, drawing illustratively on empirical work in the field of doctoral examination. The comparison of the Habermasian theory of cognitive interests with Chinn et al.’s notion of epistemic cognition led to the conclusion that there were areas of overlap between the two conceptual schemas that could be utilised to advance research into doctoral examination in higher education. Habermas’ cognitive interests (which underpin his ways of knowing theory) offer a conceptual lens that facilitates analysis of the interaction of ontological and epistemic components of knowledge production. Chinn et al.’s notion of epistemic cognition allows for finer grained analysis of aspects of the cognitive work involved in knowledge rendition. This work is particularly pertinent in an era that sees the boundaries of the disciplines being challenged by the need for new perspectives and cross-disciplinary approaches to solving complex problems.

Journal Editors: Gatekeepers or Custodians?

Journals editors are often seen as gatekeepers in the writing for publication process. Some, however, see reviewers as the key arbiters. In our view, however, the situation is more complex than this. We see editors as mediating between reviewers, authors and the disciplinary community in terms of its expectations for papers in their scholarly journals. This may be in terms of the author’s choice of topic and/or methodology, as well as the contribution that the article makes to the research area. In this chapter, we draw on our own experience to discuss how these issues are considered by editors of academic journals and make suggestions for how novice writers can consider these matters as they submit their work for scholarly publication. We also discuss the challenges junior scholars face in dealing with these matters.

Voices, identities, negotiations and conflicts: writing academic English across cultures

themselves perceive and react to KFL learners’ honorifics usage. Lastly, the author remarks that certain social variables, such as age and the social positions of professionals, influence the learners’ honorifics usage (e.g. avoiding non-honorific panmal). However, it must be stressed that this very same principle applies to L1 speakers as well. For instance, while it appears to be conventional to use the non-honorifics style for a close friend in Korean society, in reality it is not common even for an L1 speaker to switch to panmal if the addressee is a friend with whom the speaker first became acquainted after they became adults or married and so forth. Brown’s (2011) book is a valuable contribution to the KFL literature, interlanguage pragmatics and politeness studies. As noted earlier, there are relatively few studies that investigate the acquisition of the Korean honorifics system. However, there has been a growing interest in this topic among scholars and applied linguistics students recently. Hence, this book is a great asset to the field and will be enthusiastically welcomed. I strongly recommend it and look forward to seeing more book-length studies of this topic in the future.