I am investigating on 'Dissertation writing in Second language' and I would like to know what challenges are faced by authors from those disciplines.
Joseph
Hi Joseph,
I think that, regardless of the specialized terms and expressions, different sections of a dissertation that we can see under different headings might differ from one discipline to another. For example, we have "Method" or "Methodology" in social sciences, while in health care we can have "Materials and Methods". Another example may refer to the way abstracts are written in different disciplines: in social sciences we usually don't have headings such as "Materials and Methods" or "Findings" in an abstract, but in health care we do have. Probably, Swale's CARS Model can help with this issue.
Dear Mr. Joseph Rusanganwa, I have worked on the Dental academic wrtitng. I have tried to identify distintive features of the academic writing (papers, case reports, reviews, abstracts, and theses ans dissrtation) in Dentistry. Salager-Meyer has carried out synchronic studies on Medicine.
Yes, it is noted in several cases that real technical meaning deviates when using second language also the richness of text is less impressive but observation is on undergraduate students who used 1-2 different languages in school and another at university. but also the fact of using the electronic social media terms are also reflected in some cases.
some of the challenges faced by 2nd language researchers in writing their dissertations is choice of proper tense in different sections, such as introduction, theoretical framework and methodology, literature review, analysis, etc. Another challenge is framing questions, whether to use What, How, so that question is neither too broad, nor too general in scope.
it is indeed true that disciplines converge and diverge in several respects. Regarding challenges, there is obviously going to be discipline-specific ones given that the ethics, tenets and norms of dissertation writing vary across the knowledge domains Joseph has outlined to investigate. Specifically, I think that the challenges can be classified into discoursal and non-discoursal ones. The discoursal ones may include organization principle for literature review, choice of rhetorical resources such as metadiscourse, stance and evaluation, and even the moves in each of the thesis parts such as abstract, chapters, etc. On the other hand, the non-discoursal challenges may include data source, instrument design, validity, reliability, and most importantly supervision. i want to touch on supervision (style, person, etc) because i think that challengges on this matter can help in constructing the identity of disciplines.
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