Dissertation Writing in Science: Self-reports by Students and Their Advisors from Two U.S. Institutions

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Pergamon

English for Specific Purposes, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 369–390, 1998 © 1998 The American University. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain 0889-4906/98 $19.00+0.00

PII: S0889±4906(97)00054±9

Non-native Graduate Students' Thesis/Dissertation Writing in Science: Self-reports by Students and Their Advisors from Two U.S. Institutions Yu Ren Dong Abstract—This article reports results from a survey of 169 graduate students and their thesis/dissertation advisors at two U.S. southeastern institutions about thesis/dissertation writing in science. The article compares the article compilation and the traditional five-chapter thesis/dissertation, reveals nonnative students’ lack of social networks and use of writing resources and their suggestions for an adequate and improved thesis/dissertation writing supervision, and examines the impact of language and cultural differences on non-native students’ thesis/dissertation writing. Findings indicate the need for teaching knowledge transformation skills in EAP classes, establishing helping networks, and a collaboration among disciplines on audience/genre/ discipline specific writing instruction. © 1998 The American University. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Introduction Writing a thesis/dissertation is a most formidable task for many graduate students. This is not only because of the daunting size of the document but also because of the high standard to which the thesis/dissertation is held. The writing challenge is not only demonstrating knowledge related to the research but also using that knowledge to ‘‘argue logically and coherently the meaning of the research results’’ (Council of Graduate Schools in the U.S., 1991, p. 11). Many graduate students do not begin to learn how to approach this task until they are in the process of writing a thesis/ dissertation. The situation becomes more complicated with the fast growing number of non-native graduate students in the fields of science and technology. According to Zikopoulos (1991), in some natural science and engineering fields, non-native graduate students are the recipients of more than half the total number of doctoral degrees (See ‘Characteristics of Recipients — –––––––––––––––––––– Address correspondence to: Yu Ren Dong, P.H. 195, Secondary Education Dept, Queens College, CUNY, 65–30 Kissena Blvd., Flushing, NY 11367, U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected]

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of Doctorates’, 1996). Therefore, the language, cultural, and educational backgrounds which these students bring to the writing task and the difficulties that they experience in thesis/dissertation writing deserve careful attention. Although many studies have investigated discipline specific writing tasks and native and non-native students’ difficulties with academic writing (Braine, 1989, 1995; Bridgeman & Carlson, 1984; Canseco & Byrd, 1989; Casanave & Hubbard, 1992; Horowitz, 1986; Jenkins, Jordan & Weiland, 1993; West & Byrd, 1982), actual research on non-native graduate students’ writing difficulties and how faculty assist these students in their thesis/dissertation writing is sparse. Shaw (1991) carried out an in-depth interview study with a sample of 22 non-native graduate students who were at the stage of dissertation writing in science, which showed that dissertation writing in science involved a coparticipation of the student and the dissertation supervisor on a team research project. The dissertation supervisor had a tremendous impact on the topic selection, the format decision, and the writing of the literature review. Shaw’s findings also suggested that nonnative graduate students’ native languages and cultures did not seem to greatly influence their dissertation writing. What seemed to influence their writing was the discipline, genre, and audience specific knowledge, including access to various resources in the disciplinary community, discipline specific vocabulary, and perceptions of the audience of their dissertations. Powers (1994) surveyed both faculty and native and non-native graduate students who had just completed theses and dissertations. She identified major problems with non-native graduate students’ writing such as organization, synthesis, and clear, concise, and correct writing. Powers’ survey results revealed that faculty reported spending far more time working on non-native graduate students’ theses and dissertations than on those of native graduate students. Interestingly, she found conflicting responses when comparing faculty advisors’ responses with students’. For example, comparing faculty’s reports of general high percentages of kinds of help given by them, students indicated general low percentages of kinds of help received, especially in the areas of the goals and the objectives of thesis/dissertation writing and using an appropriate tone for the field. The thesis/dissertation advisor has an important role to play in socializing the advisee into the disciplinary community through thesis/dissertation writing supervision. Studies that have investigated the impact of the advisoradvisee relationship and the assumed role of the advisor in thesis/ dissertation supervision have mainly focused on the beginning stage of the socialization process, when non-native graduate students write for course work (Casanave, 1992; Prior, 1991, 1995; Schneider & Fujishima, 1995); when they choose dissertation topics (Bargar & Mayo-Chamberlain, 1983); and how thesis/dissertation supervision varies from discipline to discipline (Acker, Hill & Black, 1994). We know very little about the latter part of this socialization process, that is the process of writing a thesis/dissertation.

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Friedman (1987) interviewed 58 graduate advisors and native English speaking and non-native English speaking graduate students from four universities. The findings of her study showed that non-native English speaking students often did not have as many resources and helping networks as their native peers. Non-native students suffered most when they did not share the expectations of their advisors and when the supervision of their advisors lacked sufficient guidance assistance. Belcher’s study (1994) of three non-native doctoral students’ dissertation writing further illustrated this negative impact caused by a mismatch in the perception of the purpose of dissertation writing. In two of the three pairs that she studied, the advisor and the advisee had conflicts about what is appropriate for a dissertation in their field in the first place. According to Belcher, it is only when the advisee and the advisor share the conceptualization of their discourse community that their relationship becomes rewarding and satisfying and dissertation writing becomes productive. According to a study done by the Council of Graduate Schools (1991) surveying 50 universities in the U.S. and Canada, there is a variation in form across disciplines of what constitutes a dissertation. The study identified variation in the dissertation form and content ranging from the traditional five-chapter monograph to previously published work and to a series of compiled unpublished articles. The variation in the dissertation form was determined by differences in the nature of research, the structure and expectations of the discipline, and the accepted form for publication in the discipline. According to this report, ‘‘In engineering and the physical and biological sciences, which are increasingly team disciplines with large groups of investigators working on common problems, dissertation often present, in varied formats, the results of several independent but related experiments’’ (p. 20). A pilot investigation conducted by the present investigator confirmed this variation. In one of the universities where the present study was conducted, individual departments of the scientific disciplines had options for the thesis/ dissertation form. Some graduate students wrote traditional five-chapter dissertation reporting on a unified research project; others wrote dissertations comprising autonomous journal articles connected on one major theme with usually one of two articles for the masters thesis and three or four articles for the doctoral dissertation. The article-compilation format gives graduate students on-the-job training, preparing them for what they will be expected to do in their fields after they receive the Ph.D degree. In addition, the article format reduces the time for publication if dissertation chapters can be submitted directly for journal publication, without requiring extensive pruning and reformatting; therefore, it meets the need for timely knowledge dissemination and it starts to accumulate credits for the student’s professional career. To date there is limited research studying differences as well as similarities between the traditional monograph thesis/dissertation writing and research article writing (Hopkins & Dudley-Evans, 1988; Swales, 1990).

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What we do have in the literature on non-native graduate students’ thesis/ dissertation writing has revealed the following themes: (a) Thesis/dissertation writing in the fields of science and engineering appears to be a collaborative enterprise. In these papers, the rhetorical structures and the invention of the thesis/dissertation, including selecting a topic, identifying a problem, and formatting the thesis/ dissertation, revolve around the complex social construction of the disciplinary community. (b) Non-native graduate students show more writing difficulties with discipline specific, genre specific,and audience specific knowledge. (c) Non-native graduate students’ lack of social networks and lack of resources to draw on become a serious problem in that these factors not only affect their writing, but most importantly also create a barrier to their becoming full members of the community. With science and engineering disciplines attracting more and more non-native English speaking students. we need to investigate the writing difficulties experienced by this group of students, the advisor’s supervision and assistance in the advisee’s thesis/dissertation writing, and the genre conventions of the thesis/dissertation in science and technology. Therefore, this study attempts to investigate: (1) non-native English speaking graduate students’ difficulties with thesis/ dissertation writing; (2) these students’ discipline, genre, and audience specific knowledge about thesis/dissertation writing in science; (3) the quality and quantity of the supervisor’s assistance in thesis/ dissertation writing from the perspectives of both faculty advisors and their advisees; (4) the available helping networks for non-native graduate students; (5) the impact of perceived language and cultural differences on thesis/ dissertation writing.

Method Survey Participants The study was conducted at two state research universities in the U.S. Southeast: Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) and The University of Georgia (UGA). The sampling procedure involved three levels of selection: academic departments, individual graduate students, and paired advisors and advisees. The choice of academic departments reflected the focus of the study on science and engineering based on the fact that there were substantial numbers of non-native English speaking graduate students in these departments. To select students for the study, I asked the graduate coordinator in each department at UGA to provide the names and the addresses of both native and non-native master’s and doctoral students who

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had completed the course work and passed the qualifying examinations and were in the process of doing their thesis/dissertation research and writing. Non-native graduate students at UGA were asked to name their faculty advisors, and these matched faculty members were then solicited. For the selection of the student respondents from GIT, I requested that graduate students in their first two years be removed from the list given by the Office of Graduate Studies and Research, based on the assumption that these students would not yet be familiar enough with dissertation research and writing to provide informed responses. In all, 775 surveys were distributed. The overall return rate was 28%, and the usable return rate was 26%. Of all 169 survey respondents, 137 were students and 32 were professors (professors were only surveyed at UGA). Among all the respondents, 127 were males and 41 were females (one participant did not identify the sex). Students ranged in age from 21 to 40, with an average of 28.77. The 137 student respondents had an average GRE verbal score of 473.02 for UGA students and 482.42 for GIT students. Their affiliation with their current advisors ranged from less than a year to 12 years, with an average of 2.93 years. The majority of the survey student respondents were doctoral students. Survey respondents also included 14 masters students and 11 postdoctoral associates who had just completed and defended their dissertations. Survey respondents represented 23 departments in the scientific disciplines and covered 74 specialized areas. Non-native graduate students (N = 106) came from 25 different countries, the two most frequently occurring countries were mainland China (27.36%) and India (12.26%). Table 2 illustrates the native language identified by non-native survey respondents. Non-native students’ TOEFL scores had an average of 601.37 for UGA students and 597.38 for GIT students. Over half of the non-native respondents (59.3%) reported that they had received their previous degrees outside the U.S. Using matched pair procedures, 25 matched pairs of non-native English speaking graduate students and their native English speaking advisors from UGA were formed. These pairs came from Biochemistry (4 pairs); Biological & Agricultural Engineering (1 pair); Botany (1 pair); Chemistry (3 pairs); Computer Science (1 pair); Ecology (4 pairs); Genetics (3 pairs); Microbiology (1 pair); Pharmacy (2 pairs); Physics (1 pair); and Zoology (4 pairs). Survey Instruments The survey instruments included a Thesis/Dissertation Writing Scale and a Questionnaire. The Thesis/Dissertation Writing Scale was developed by the researcher specially for this study. It consisted of 40 primary questions, about half of which were forced choices. For example, one survey question was: While writing your thesis/dissertation, how useful do you find the writing experience you received from courses you took in your graduate program? The forced choices were: (1) useless, (2) slightly useful, (3) useful, (4) very useful, and (5) extremely useful. The questionnaire was an

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adaptation of the interview protocol developed by Shaw (1991). It consisted of 24 questions including method of the thesis/dissertation topic selection, thesis/dissertation writing resources, influences of native language in composing, and the like. Questions in the questionnaire were either closed or open-ended. For example, one survey question was: Do you think in your native language when you do multiplication? Topic areas of the questionnaire paralleled those questions on the scale. Moreover, the questions in the questionnaire probed such items as the amount of drafting done by faculty advisors, suggestions for advisors to provide better assistance in writing, and perceived difficulties with thesis/dissertation writing. Interviews with professors and non-native graduate students from the departments of Biochemistry, Biological and Agricultural Engineering, Biology, Botany, Chemistry, Ecology, and Zoology at UGA were carried out to ensure the survey instruments’ content validity. Students and professors from these departments read the survey instruments and judged whether the instruments could measure the variables being studied. Special effort was made to ensure that the survey instruments were easily understood and appropriately interpreted. Wording on the instruments was adjusted to survey respondent groups where appropriate, i.e. student/professor; native student/non-native student; GIT student/UGA student; UGA 25 paired nonnative advisee/native advisor. Different versions of the survey instruments were developed for the different groups of respondents. For example, one survey question was: How often do you interact with your labmates and staff in your department in writing your thesis/dissertation? It was phrased for professors as, ‘‘Estimate how often your advisee(s) (the name of the advisee) interacts with his/her labmates or staff in the department in writing his/her thesis/dissertation.’’ Survey Data Analysis Data analysis for the survey involved both quantitative and qualitative procedures. For 48 quantitative variables, appropriate descriptive statistics (relative frequencies and means) were compiled. Respondent grouping variables allowed for inter-group contrasts: (1) language status: native vs nonnative students, (2) institutions: UGA non-native graduate students vs GIT non-native graduate students, (3) academic status: all students vs all faculty advisors, and (4) academic status in matched pairs: paired non-native graduate students vs their advisors. To make these comparisons, Chi square tests (for categorical data) and t-test (for continuous data) were performed. For a few variables, date categories had to be collapsed to ensure well-conditioned Chi square tests. Responses to open-ended questions were analyzed by using analytic constant comparison procedures. The unit of discourse used in coding was the response to each open-ended question. The constant comparison method requires the researcher ‘‘while coding an incident for a category, to compare it with the previous incidents in the same and different groups coded in the

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same category’’ (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, p. 106). For example, differences were found in comparing responses between non-native and native students regarding the use of a thesaurus. As a result, a category of thesaurus use emerged. Another example, while contrasting the responses to the question about thesis/dissertation readers, different audience categories began to emerge. The final analytic categories for these responses which emerged from this process are the following: scientific community, advisor, thesis/ dissertation committee, fellow students, and people in academia.

Results In this section, I report results obtained from the thesis/dissertation writing scale and the questionnaire centered around four major areas of thesis/dissertation writing: (1) comparing the traditional five-chapter thesis/ dissertation with the article compilation thesis/dissertation; (2) the advisors’ perceived assistance in thesis/dissertation writing, (3) disciplinary socialization though thesis/dissertation writing, and (4) the perceived impact of language and cultural differences on thesis/dissertation writing. Comparing the Traditional Five-Chapter Thesis/Dissertation with the Article Compilation Thesis/Dissertation Over one third of the questions in the survey asked both the students and the professors for their understanding of genre specific knowledge of the thesis/dissertation. Responses revealed that overall in this sample, 38% of the graduate students were writing in the article-compilation format. Native students reported significantly more use of the new format (62%), compared to non-native students (31%); however, a close examination of the results showed that the difference can be explained by the institution difference. Cross institution comparison revealed a difference in the thesis/dissertation format between the two institutions, UGA and GIT. Whereas 88% of all nonnative students at GIT wrote traditional dissertation, non-native students at UGA had a choice between the two formats. In spite of all this, native graduate students still reported more use of the article format (62%) compared to (50%) of non-native graduate students at UGA. Findings also showed an impact of this variation in format on graduate students’ thesis/dissertation writing. Respondents were asked in an openended question to name the readership of their theses-dissertations. These responses were statistically significant. From the perspectives of the graduate students at UGA, the audience of the article compilation thesis/ dissertation was the general scientific community, while the audience of the traditional thesis/dissertation was the advisor, the thesis/dissertation committee, and lab. mates. A comparison of the two formats further showed that the sequence of writing varied significantly from the traditional thesis/ dissertation to the article compilation. In the traditional thesis/ dissertation, the introductory chapter was usually written before the other

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chapters, while in the article compilation, ir was written more often after other chapters. The survey also compared three writing tasks in the thesis/ dissertation writing process. They were the proposal, the article compilation, and the traditional thesis/dissertation chapters. Those comparisons revealed differences in the advisors’ expectations and involvement. For articles intended for publication, the advisors required an average of 3.3 drafts, ranging from one to 15; fewer drafts were required for the proposal, ranging from one to 10 with an average of 2.31 drafts; and the fewest drafts were required for the traditional thesis/dissertation, ranging from one draft to 6 drafts with an average of 2.09 drafts. Results also illustrated the advisors’ involvement in thesis/dissertation writing in terms of the percentage of writing produced by them. The advisors in this survey produced a relatively lower percentage of writing for both their native and non-native advisees’ traditional theses/dissertations; however, they produced a relatively higher percentage of writing for both their native and non-native advisees’ compiled articles. Advisors' Perceived Assistance in Thesis/Dissertation Writing Altogether, 20 questions were asked to determine the perceptions of the assistance given and received from both the professor and the student respondents. Table 1 illustrates the results from this comparison. As Table 1 indicates, professors’ reports of the kinds of help they provided were uniformly more generous than their students’ own estimates. Professors were more likely than students to claim that they had provided the following types of assistance: topic decision, idea development, drawing conclusions,

TABLE 1 Perception of Kinds of Help by Social Status of the Survey Respondents Variables 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Topic decision Literature reading Article citations Paragraph organizing Word use correction Grammar and Mechanics Paragraph drafting Idea developing Chapter outlining Connections and transitions Logical presentation Heading selecting Problems stating clearly Conclusion drawing Plagiarism avoidance

Students (N = 122)

Professors (N = 32)

45 (36.89%) 21 (17.21%) 22 (18.03%) 36 (29.51%) 60 (49.18%) 55 (45.08%) 17 (13.93%) 37 (30.03%) 9 (7.38%) 31 (25.41%) 37 (30.33%) 13 (10.66%) 40 (32.79%) 26 (21.31%) 5 (4.10%)

22 (68.75%) 10 (31.25%) 12 (37.50%) 16 (50.00%) 16 (50.00%) 20 (62.50%) 7 (21.87%) 23 (71.87%) 10 (31.25%) 11 (34.38%) 17 (53.13%) 5 (15.63%) 14 (43.75%) 18 (56.25%) 8 (25.00%)

X2 (df = 1, N = 154) *P ³ 0.05. **P ³ 0.01. ***P ³ 0.001 ****P ³ 0.0001

X2 10.473*** 3.107 5.584** 4.760* 0.007 3.079 1.215 18.401**** 13.358**** 1.027 5.786* 0.606 1.338 15.163**** 14.329****

Phi 0.26 0.14 0.19 0.18 0.01 0.14 0.09 0.35 0.30 0.08 0.19 0.06 0.09 0.31 0.31

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Thesis/Dissertation Writing in Science TABLE 2 Perception of Kinds of Help by Social Status of the Matched Pairs Variables 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Topic decision Literature reading Article citations Paragraph organizing Word use correction Grammar and mechanics Paragraph drafting Idea developing Heading selecting

Students (n = 24) 8 (33.33%) 4 (16.67%) 7 (29.17%) 5 (20.83%) 8 (33.33%) 13 (54.17%) 4 (16.67%) 5 (20.83%) 2 (8.33%)

10. Chapter outlining

1 (2.04%)

11. 12. 13. 14.

5 (10.20%) 6 (25.00%) 7 (29.17%) 2 (8.33%)

Connections and transitions Logical presentation Problem stating clearly Conclusion drawing

15. Plagiarism avoidance

2 (8.33%)

Professors (n = 25)

X2

Phi

17 (68.00%) 5.889** 0.35 7 (28.00%) 0.903 0.14 10 (40.00%) 0.634 0.11 13 (52.00%) 5.118* 0.32 13 (52.00%) 1.742 0.19 17 (68.00%) 0.987 0.14 6 (24.00%) 0.405 0.09 19 (76.00%) 14.912*** 0.55 3 (12.00%) 0.180 0.06 Fisher’s Exact = 1.000 E−2 9 (36.00%) 7.639** 0.39 Fisher’s Exact = 1.06 E−2 7 (28.00%) 0.340 0.08 12 (48.00%) 2.787 0.24 10 (40.00%) 0.634 0.11 13 (52.00%) 10.992*** 0.47 Fisher’s Exact = 1.49 E−3*** 7 (28.00%) 3.159 0.25 Fisher’s Exact = 7.82 E−2

X2 (df = 1; N = 49) *P ³ 0.05. **P ³ 0.01. ***P ³ 0.001. ****P ³ 0.0001

article citations, avoidance of plagiarism, paragraph organization, and logical presentation. No statistically significant differences between faculty advisors and students were found for assistance in reading the research literature, correcting the use of words, grammar and mechanics, drafting paragraphs, writing the whole thesis, deciding headings, connections/transitions, or stating the problem clearly. Across all the respondent groups, the areas of correct word usage and grammar and mechanics were most frequently designated as areas in which advisors provided assistance. An analysis of the 25 matched advisor-advisee pairs from UGA confirmed this conflicting finding. As Table 2 illustrates below, differences exist in responses to the kinds of help given and received between the matched pairs of professors and their students in the areas of topic decision, paragraph organization, chapter outlines, idea development, and drawing conclusions. The quantity of the advisors’ assistance and the timing of the introductory chapters or research articles also varied from these two groups’ responses. Professors’ responses to the category ‘‘not yet’’ (meaning that either the writing had not started yet, or the student was not required to write this document type) on the scale was significantly more frequent (43%) than the percentage of students’ responses (13%). In other words, a significant number of students who attested that they had begun drafting their theses/ dissertations were likely to have advisors who were unaware of that fact. In those paired comparisons, even those faculty advisors who did acknowledge that their advisees were in the process of writing tended to give lower

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estimates of the amount of time that their students spent writing relative to their students’ own estimates. It is quite interesting to observe that graduate students’ perceptions of their advisors’ assistance differed across the two institutions. Table 3 enumerates differences in responses to those types of help between the two institutions. In general, students at GIT were more likely than their peers at UGA to report the advisor’s help in tackling major rhetorical hurdles like a clear statement of the research problem or drawing conclusions. In their open-ended responses, graduate students highlighted as most helpful the assistance from their advisors about ways of expressing ideas, improving organization and coherence, presenting data, and correcting style and format. For example, one non-native graduate student (GIT #027) wrote: ‘‘Most useful comments will be on the content of the thesis and the meaning of the paragraphs. Also comments on the structure of a phrase such that it expresses more accurately and clearly what I want to say.’’ Another nonnative graduate student (UGA #103) appreciated ‘‘comments to accommodate my writing to journal article style and comments on the coherence of the flow of ideas.’’ The third non-native student (UGA #097) felt it beneficial that his advisor gave help with ‘‘how to express an idea or to organize a set of sentences to make myself clear and academically acceptable.’’ Results were statistically significant in comparison of their evaluation of dissertation writing supervision between native non-native students. While 57.89% of the native graduate students said that they were satisfied with their advisors’ advice, only 29.83% non-native graduate students felt so (P ³ 0.05).

TABLE 3 Perception of Kinds of Help by Institution Variables 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Topic decision Literature reading Article citations Paragraph organization Word use correction Grammar and mechanics Idea developing Paragraph drafting Chapter outlining

10. Heading selecting 11. 12. 13. 14.

Connections and transitions Logical presentation Problem stating clearly Conclusion drawing

15. Plagiarism avoidance

X2

GIT (N = 40)

UGA (N-53)

14 (35.00%) 9 (22.50%) 10 (25.00%) 11 (27.50%) 19 (47.50%) 15 (37.50%) 20 (50.00%) 8 (20.00%) 4 (10.00%)

22 (41.51%) 0.407 0.07 9 (16.98%) 0.445 −0.07 9 (16.98%) 0.902 −0.09 14 (26.42%) 0.014 −0.01 25 (47.17%) 0.001 −0.00 26 (49.06%) 1.235 0.12 10 (18.87%) 10.111*** −0.33 8 (15.09%) 0.385 −0.06 2 (3.77%) 1.464 −0.12 Fisher’s Exact = 0.397 E−2 4 (7.55%) 1.319 −0.12 Fisher’s Exact = 0.318 E−2 7 (13.21%) 6.193** 0.26 12 (22.64%) 0.645 −0.08 14 (26.42%) 4.427* 0.22 3 (5.66%) 14.805**** 0.40 Fisher’s Exact = 1.51 E−4**** 3 (5.66%) 0.020 0.01 Fisher’s Exact = 1.00 E−2

6 (15.00%) 14 (35.00%) 12 (30.00%) 19 (47.50%) 15 (37.50%) 2 (5%)

X2 (df = 1, N = 93) *P ³ 0.05. **P ³ 0.01. ***P ³ 0.001. ****P ³ 0.0001

Phi

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When asked to make suggestions for improvement of the thesis/dissertation supervision, both native and non-native students suggested that their advisors improve by (1) becoming more involved; (2) giving more freedom and (3) cooperation; and (4) offering more specific and (5) less negative corrections. There were no statistically significant differences between native and non-native students. Non-native graduate students made a wide range of suggestions to their advisors, ranging from simply better handwriting to reading their drafts and responding to them; from giving explicit corrections to explaining the reasons behind the revisions; from taking more time to finding someone to proofread drafts, and from providing a help network to offering more resources. For example, one Urdu speaking graduate student (GIT #012) said, ‘‘if he [my advisor] can read and correct or even rephrase the whole thing, I will learn how the same thing could have been communicated in a rather effective manner.’’ One Korean speaking graduate student (GIT #029) wrote, ‘‘ I want my advisor to provide me with the newest research development and materials concerning my topic.’’ One German speaking graduate student (UGA #094) wanted the advisor to just ‘‘be more interested [in what I am doing].’’ One Tamil speaking graduate student (UGA #157) suggested the advisor ‘‘make me aware of the requirements of the school.’’ Suggestions made by native graduate students were mainly related to the feedback given. One native graduate student (UGA #078)complained about ‘‘nasty red marks everywhere.’’ Another native graduate student (UGA #055) asked for the advisor ‘‘to be more specific in her comments, less judgmental, and to give me more freedom to write in my own style.’’

Disciplinary Socialization through Thesis/Dissertation Writing A quarter of the questions in the survey addressed sociocultural contexts in thesis/dissertation writing. Questions were asked about the advisor– advisee relationship, social networks, outside help, etc. About 60% of the respondents claimed that their thesis/dissertation research involved collaborative team work. When asked to consider the relationship prior to thesis/dissertation writing, 92% of advisors rated it as good or very good, compared with 68% of non-native graduate students. Interestingly, only about 76% advisors rated the relationship as highly when asked to assess the relationship during or after thesis/dissertation writing. Although the result was not statistically significant, it did indicate a trend. Respondents were asked to indicate who else besides their advisors provided assistance during thesis/dissertation writing. One quarter of all students indicated that they received assistance from committee members. Proportionately more non-native graduate students (44%, v 23% of native graduate students), indicated they had no assistance other than from their advisors. These frequencies reported by students were significantly different from those obtained from faculty advisors, who were less likely to indicate

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‘‘nobody’’ (14%) and much more likely to think that advisees received assistance from committee members (55%). In general, survey results portrayed non-native graduate students as somewhat socially isolated in their thesis/dissertation writing. First, when asked how often they talked with staff and other students about their theses/ dissertations, 53% of non-native graduate students responded either ‘‘ not yet’’ or ‘‘infrequently;’’ while only 37% of native graduate students reported so. In contrast, only 22% of advisors had the same impression of their advisees’ social isolation. When asked how many other people in their laboratories were working on related topics, native graduate students indicated an average of 1.3 others and non-native graduate students indicated an average of 2.55 other people working on their topics. The frequency of the non-native graduate students’ sense of isolation is significant, and surprising, given the collaborative nature and social contexts of writing for these science writers. Nearly half of the non-native graduate students said that they simply had nobody’s help except their advisor’s, though many of them wished they had had a native English speaker’s help with writing. Also nearly 20% of them reported that they had no interaction with their peers or staff at all regarding thesis/dissertation writing. In identifying outside help, non-native students again exhibited a limited use of resources. They tended to rely on their fellow country students for help. Although many of them voiced a need for proofreading from native speakers, very few ever did receive any help from native English speakers other than their advisors or the Writing Center in the English department. Finally survey results showed a limited use by ESL writers of published resources, like a thesaurus or a publication guide. The Perceived Impact of Language and Cultural Differences on Thesis/Dissertation Writing Several questions in the survey were designed to investigate whether language, cultural, and educational differences between native and nonnative graduate students made a difference in their thesis/dissertation writing. For example, survey respondents were asked to report their perceived weak points in research writing. Proportionally more native English speaking graduate students (72%) than their non-native peers (49%) designated their weak points in writing as grammar and mechanics. In contrast, nonnative graduate students (30%) were more likely than their native peers (10%) to indicate problems with vocabulary. When asked what areas of English were most important in writing research articles, 100% of non-native graduate students indicated vocabulary, as compared with 40% of native graduate students who reported so. Other problems mentioned by both groups included unity, sequencing, and transitions. Faculty advisors were also asked to comment upon the language and writing skills of both their non-native and native graduate advisees. A convergence was found comparing students’ and professors’ responses. For

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example, several professors did mention the failure to use correct grammatical structures as a problem in non-native graduate students’ writing, but they were also careful to note that native graduate students’ writing was far from error free. Comparing his Chinese speaking advisees with his English speaking advisees, one professors (UGA #140) said, ‘‘Sentence structure is often poor for native and non-native speakers; it is worse for the latter.’’ Faculty also noted that writing problems for both native and non-native students might be due to lack of rhetorical and genre knowledge of the discipline besides language difficulties. One professor (UGA #138) complained that his non-native advisee used ‘‘unexplained or unjustified statements.’’ Another advisor (UGA #137) recognized the importance of ‘‘adapting declarative style characteristic of English science writing’’ for non-native students. Yet a third professor (UGA #142) focused on style, observing that, ‘‘non-native advisees do not appreciate or cannot use the subtleties of the language—they do not ‘craft’ the writing—but neither do many Americans.’’ A few faculty advisors recognized a problem of plagiarism pertaining to non-native graduate students. For example, one professor (UGA #139) noted, ‘‘Major problem [for non-native graduate students is] to use their own words, not to borrow from papers that are already published.’’ Another professor (UGA #135) recognized this problem too saying, ‘‘non-native speakers tend to lift [copy] sentences from books, papers, etc. They do not know that plagiarism is illegal. Ironically—due to their poor writing style, the copied section is very obvious.’’ When asked about their previous research writing experience in English, both native graduate students and non-native graduate students seemed to have had about the same experience in advanced English writing. Sixty percent of non-native graduate students and 77% of native graduate students indicated that they had written five of more research reports prior to undertaking their theses/dissertations. The impact of non-native students’ native language on their writing in English was also investigated in the survey. When asked in what contexts they wrote in their native language, 45% of non-native graduate students claimed that they never wrote in their native languages at all. Many nonnative graduate students viewed English as their working language because of their educational and research exposures. The only reported occasions when they used their native languages for some higher order thinking were (1) when writing outlines, (2) organizing their writing, (3) phrasing the words when at a loss for words in English, and (4) for solving logical problems and developing ideas. For example, one Polish speaking graduate student (UGA #085) noted, ‘‘I use Polish when I don’t know the English word to express myself. I try to find the right word in Polish that is similar in English.’’ One Korean speaking graduate student (GIT #029) wrote, ‘‘I think in my native language when I try to organize the structure of the article.’’ One German speaking graduate student (GIT #010) explained: ‘‘I think in my native language when I do computation or memorization of

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names and phone numbers. Whenever a complex logical argument is made or I am not sure about wording, I use my native language.’’ When asked in the open-ended questionnaire about differences in writing between their native languages and English, one third of non-native English speaking graduate students stated that they were not aware of any. However, 30% said that they noticed many differences but could not explain them. Only 15% listed differences in grammar; 26% listed more rhetorical issues, such as differences in formality, objectivity, conciseness, technical details, and precision. One Portuguese speaking graduate student (GIT #032) wrote, ‘‘In my native language, you are supposed to construct sentences to transmit the exact idea you want to transmit, avoid repetitions and excessive splitting [of] ideas. An English text sounds like an elementary school student’s essay.’’ One Chinese speaking graduate student (GIT #034) wrote, ‘‘English writing stresses more logic; Chinese is kind of descriptive so sometimes [it] is loose in logic.’’ One Spanish speaking graduate student (UGA #103) responded, ‘‘My native language is a bit more ‘flowery’. My native language tends to use subordinate sentences a bit more often.’’ Contrasting French and English, one French speaking graduate student (UGA #009) wrote, ‘‘English is more concise and French is more precise.’’ One Turkish speaking graduate student (GIT #045) noted the difficulty with reading in English. He said, ‘‘When I read, the lack of commas in English makes it harder.’’ One Korean speaking graduate student (GIT #029) noted the difference in word order between Korean and English. The survey results revealed that faculty advisors tended to draft a higher percentage of the texts produced by non-native students that those produced by native students. For example, when asked what percentage of the thesis/ dissertation text that the advisor had actually drafted, non-native graduate students reported that an average percentage of 5.67% of their texts were drafted by their advisors; however, native graduate students reported that an average percentage of 2.4% of their text were drafted by their advisors. The same pattern emerged again when students were asked for the percentage of the article text that the advisor had actually drafted. Advisors’ drafting for non-native graduate students was at an average of 13.39% compared to their drafting for native graduate students at an average of 4%. Indeed, 30% of the faculty advisors themselves indicated in open-ended remarks that they had done substantial drafting of their non-native graduate students’ thesis/ dissertations. Said one advisor (UGA #142), ‘‘I drafted introduction and discussion of research articles [incorporated into dissertation] to save my time. It may not be a language problem but a knowledge problem and experience problem.’’ The number of drafts that was required by the advisor also differentiated non-native graduate students from native graduate students. Advisors were apparently more demanding on native graduate students in proposal and article writing. Native graduate students indicated that they were required to revise their proposal an average of 3.5 times and their article an average of 4.7 times, whereas non-native graduate students were required to produce

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an average of 2.46 drafts for the proposal and an average of 2.77 drafts for the article.

Discussion Two formats of the Thesis/Dissertation My survey results have shown that increasingly the thesis/dissertation in science may be written as a compilation of a series of publishable articles. Survey results have also suggested that students tended to devote more time to writing these articles than writing traditional five-chapter theses/ dissertations. Advisors showed more involvement in article writing, perhaps because of their co-author status and because the thesis/dissertation research is often part of a long-term funded project. The variation in the thesis/dissertation format appears to be concomitant with a change in the intended audience of the writing also (Swales, 1990). Survey respondents identified the audience of traditional theses/dissertations as mainly the advisor and the committee in academia. However, students saw the audience of research articles as including people in the broader academic and industrial fields. The writing processes varied from writing a traditional thesis/ dissertation to an article-compilation thesis/dissertation. In addition to audience awareness, the survey results revealed a difference in the writing process comparing two formats. In the article compilation, the writer tended to write the introductory section either after or at the same time as the other sections, while in the traditional thesis/dissertation, the writer tended to write the introductory chapter first. Not surprisingly, the format differs across the institutions (UGA & GIT) examined here. The article compilation format is more prevalent at the comprehensive research university than at the technical and engineering university. No doubt the variation in form reflects different orientations to research (basic vs applied) as well as differences in associated publication practices of the two faculties—in essence, different institutional and disciplinary cultures. This finding reinforces the view that studies in acquisition of advanced writing skills must take into account the social contexts of writing. Within UGA, the finding indicates that non-native graduate students are less likely to write article compilation theses/dissertations than their native peers. We need to be cautious in making any generalizations; however, my research raises the issue of equal opportunity in disciplinary acculturation. Could it be the case that native graduate students are more likely to have opportunities to advance in their career through co-authored article publication, whereas non-native graduate students are less fortunate because of their language and cultural status? An answer to this question is beyond the scope of this study. Future study is needed to address this issue.

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Social Network and Resources for Thesis/Dissertation Writing Before the survey, I anticipated that non-native students would make ready use of external resources, such as committee members and fellow students and they would avail themselves of more resources than their native peers because of the writing difficulties. However, what I found out was surprisingly different. Although graduate students in science usually work within a research community (Casanave & Hubbard, 1992; Ede & Lunsford, 1990; Trimbut & Braun, 1992), non-native students work more in isolation. In comparison, native students used more help from others besides their advisors than non-native students did. They also interacted more with peers and staff and sought much outside help from specialists in their fields, or from manuscript reviewers, or informal review groups. In addition to all these helping networks, native students also used more written resources in writing than their non-native peers, such as a thesaurus. What is alarming is that faculty advisors perceived their non-native advisees having contact with committee members, staff, and fellow students, while in reality, these students’ self-reports showed the opposite. This study found that, although non-native students and their native counterparts seemed to have equal access to the resources, they did not make good use of these resources. Possible reasons for this could be a lack of interaction between native and non-native speakers, or native speakers’ reluctance to engage in the dialogue, or their dismissal of non-native speakers due to their language status. Similarly, non-native speakers could be reluctant to participate in a conversation with native speakers, they could be reluctant to negotiate or dialogue with native speakers in order to save face, or non-native speakers could fear selfdisclosure, or they could be unable to use resources available for facilitating the dialogue. Evidence from this study suggests that non-native graduate students might not be fully privileged as participants in the disciplinary dialogue of their fields. The study revealed that non-native graduate students had less prior experience in research writing in English than did their native counterparts, though they had similar prior experience in research writing in their native languages. Thus, for proportionately more non-native graduate students, thesis/dissertation writing represented their initial venture as contributors to a universe of discourse. Also, their lack of social networks and the lack of a support system made it difficult for them to navigate in the disciplinary community and to gain means of acceptance. Furthermore, relatively fewer non-native graduate students were being guided toward article-compilation dissertations. All this suggests that they were less advantaged than native graduate students in terms of developing the publication record needed to eventually achieve credibility in their discourse communities. Finally, the quality of time advisors spent in working with non-native graduate students seemed more perfunctory and less collaborative than the time spent with native graduate students. Although advisors spent quantitatively more time with non-native graduate students (See also Jenkins,

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Jordan & Weiland, 1993) and 30% of advisors reported drafting ‘‘a large portion’’ of the text for these students’ articles, this effort was not directed toward helping the students produce publishable articles. With respect to article and proposal writing (as compared to traditional thesis/dissertation writing), advisors demanded a greater number of drafts from native students than non-native students. Thus, more opportunities were given to native students for improving their writing skills than their non-native peers. The Impact of Language and Cultural Differences on Thesis/Dissertation Writing The majority of the students in this survey reported that they spoke and wrote in English all the time at school. Their native language was mainly used in personal and informal settings, interacting with fellow country people. One interesting finding is that many non-native students considered English to be their working language or science language. When asked about rhetorical and language differences between their native languages and English, over a third of non-native students reported that they were either not aware of any differences at all or they considered it easier to do scientific writing in English than in their native languages anyway, due to the fact that they had received all their education or at least higher education, in English. Several interesting findings from the survey also confirm the influence of non-native students’ native language and culture on their thesis/dissertation writing. Although non-native students and their professors uniformly reported that the students’ theses/dissertations were drafted in English, the survey also found that some non-native students did think in their native language for calculation and number memorization and for highly intellectually demanding thinking. Several professors in the survey noted rhetorical issues relating to the stylistics of thesis/dissertation writing, e.g., insufficient elaboration or clarity. These findings are consistent with Shaw’s (1991), Powers’ (1994), and Casanave’s and Hubbard’s (1992) survey results. From their surveys, they concluded that discourse level characteristics and conventions of the discipline were the focuses of advanced academic writing. However, my survey results also show the complex nature of such writing tasks for non-native students. The linguistic and rhetorical differences between English and their native languages revealed by some non-native students further confirmed the findings of contrastive rhetoric research (Kaplan, 1966). Moreover, my survey results suggest that this language transfer may even exist at the advanced level also, after the writer has already acquired a high level of English language proficiency and, thus, compounds the problems for this group of students. Therefore, long-term and in-depth investigations are needed to further determine how much and how language and cultural differences impact non-native students’ thesis/ dissertation writing. The influence of the culturally varied expectations of the advisor’s role in dissertation supervision was evident from the survey results. Some non-

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native graduate students, especially those from Asian cultural and educational backgrounds, expected their advisors to provide more help and be more directive in giving assistance in thesis/dissertation revising. This finding confirmed Friedman’s (1987) results of culturally varied expectations from advisor and advisee in thesis/dissertation research. The issue of plagiarism raised by the faculty in the survey further indicates the different cultural and educational values and norms held by the advisor and some Asian advisees toward writing. Pennycook (1996) discussed the issue from the sociocultural, historical, and educational perspectives and argued for a deeper cross-cultural understanding of varied approaches taken to learn, to memorize, and to write. This finding suggests a need for a further investigation of plagiarism. Thesis/Dissertation Writing Supervision In general, faculty participation and collaboration in students’ thesis/ dissertation writing can be regarded as one avenue for disciplinary induction—imparting discourse and genre-specific knowledge about the field as well as linguistic and communicative knowledge. The survey identified assistance from advisors that included help in deciding the topic, developing ideas, outlining chapters, deciding headings and subheadings, and reading the literature. In the later phases of writing, advisors provided help in locating citations, organizing paragraphs, presenting ideas logically, connecting and sequencing ideas, using appropriate means of expression, stating problems clearly, avoiding plagiarism, drawing conclusions, and correcting grammar and mechanics. These results closely parallel Powers’ (1994). That students estimated advisors’ assistance to be less frequent than advisors’ own estimates appears to reflect a genuinely perceived need for more help from advisors than advisees felt they were receiving. In the end of my survey, students noted the most helpful comments and suggestions that their advisors made. These included (1) forms of expression, (2) organization and coherence, (3) presentation of the subject matter, and (4) style and format. These types of positively valued assistance corresponded to those categories of help which advisors were seen as only rarely providing: (1) developing ideas, (2) drawing conclusions, (3) organizing paragraphs, and (4) presenting ideas logically. In addition, proportionally more nonnative graduate students voiced a need for more involvement and help from their advisors. All this points to the need for increasing faculty thesis/ dissertation supervision in these areas. Two likely explanations may account for the differing patterns of responses between professors and students. First, students may hold different views from their professors as to what counts as help in the first place. In the daily life of the laboratory, professors may count an informal check on progress or a casual talk with research assistants over a cup of coffee as help; however these same students may register only formal conferences or written comments on drafts as help given. I see additional instances of

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discrepant recognition of events, comparing paired non-native students and their advisors, in the different understandings of when students had begun writing. Faculty advisors were more likely than students to indicate that the students had not yet begun to write. Students may feel they have begun writing when they are first collecting notes and citations, while professors may identify the beginning of writing as the first presentation of connected prose for their review.

Conclusion This study surveyed 137 masters and doctoral students and 32 professors at two southeastern U.S. research institutions about their perceptions of the advanced level of academic writing, thesis/dissertation writing. The findings of this survey have implications for classroom teaching pedagogy as follows: First, ESL support systems, such as EAP writing classes, should make efforts to connect generic writing instruction with students’ future academic disciplines. Findings from the survey suggest that writing instruction at the advanced level should extend to explicit teaching of knowledge transformation skills (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987) instead of being limited to knowledge telling skills. Non-native graduate students in this survey articulated their need for help with article citations, paragraph organization, logical presentation, idea developing, conclusion drawing, chapter outline, and avoidance of plagiarism. We teachers of writing and ESL should explicitly teach how to write from sources and write for synthesis. We must also explicitly teach functions of citations and their various formats besides teaching linguistic knowledge. Second, my survey results also have shown a disadvantage for non-native students in their lack of social networks. In addition, non-native students seemed unaware of other resources for help with their writing, and their advisors seemed unaware of the dilemma of their non-native advisees. This suggests an urgent need for the university, the department, and postgraduate advisors to join forces to initiate helping networks and to provide these resources. The resources may include peer proofreading and informal review groups and courses designed to teach research writing, such as how to do a literature review and how to write an introduction. Some non-native students in this survey expressed their strong desire for a native peer proofreader or a writing club where they could consult about writing in their specific disciplines. Writing centers should link with the departments and recruit those with not only linguistic knowledge but also content and rhetorical knowledge in a discipline in order to meet the real needs of these students. Non-native students need training in the use of a thesaurus, computer software programs, writing style books, and the journal guidelines in their disciplines early on, instead of waiting until they face thesis/ dissertation writing. Third, my survey findings further illustrate the overriding impact of disciplinary culture on thesis/dissertation writing. We should introduce issues

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including the collaborative nature of advanced academic writing, disciplinary discourse communities, and knowledge about the audience and the genre from early on in order to raise students’ awareness of the social contexts of writing (Swales & Feak, 1994). A course in the advanced level of academic writing might be designed using team-teaching (Dudley-Evans, 1995), that is, a collaboration of the experts in various academic disciplines and experts in ESL and writing. It is only through exchanging information and sharing expertise that the writing course can provide rich and authentic instruction to meet the demands of writing practices in the disciplines. Also, even at the beginning stage of their academic writing, ESL students should be encouraged to venture out to explore the social contexts of writing in their future disciplines and to investigate the local discourse community. Collaborative writers from various disciplines should be invited to ESL writing classes to talk about their experiences in collaborative writing processes. Acknowledgements—This paper is based on part of my dissertation study. I acknowledge Donald L. Rubin’s supervision of my dissertation. I am grateful to Myra Zarnowski and John Walsh for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. (Revised version received April 1997)

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Swales, J., & Freak, C. B. (1994). Writing for graduate students: Essential tasks and skills. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan. Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. New York: Cambridge University Press. Swales, J. M. (1987). Citation analysis and discourse analysis. Applied Linguistics, 7, 39–56. Trimbur, J., & Braun, L. A. (1992). Laboratory life and the determination of authorship. In J. Forma (Ed.), New visions of collaborative writing. (pp. 19–36). Heinemann Portsmouth, NH: Boynton Cook Publishers, Inc. West, G. K., & Byrd, P. (1982). Technical writing required of graduate engineering students. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 12, 1–6. Zikopoulos, M. (1991). Open doors 1990/1991: Report on international educational exchange. New York: Institute of International Education. Yu Ren Dong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Secondary Education and Youth Services, Queens College, City University of New York. Her major research interests are second language writing across academic disciplines and using ESL methodology in subject matter instruction for public high schools.