A recent flurry of posts on the BALEAP discussion list requesting PhD thesis writing resources got me reflecting on my own experiences of working with postdoctoral students on writing for research. Coincidentally, a post appeared in Patter on a similar topic. Pat Thomson is a Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham. She researches ‘the arts, creativity and other kinds of experiential approaches in school and community settings’ and also writes books, papers and this blog on research communication. When I was teaching I found her blog enormously insightful for teaching research communication.
I have not read or used any of the resources recommended in the BALEAP list but I imagine that at some point they introduce a key macrostructure of research communication Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion (IMRaD). Prof Thomson acknowledges that these sections need to be there but they do not of themselves provide guidance on how a reader/assessor is to work through the content being presented. She likens it to going to a cafe and ordering a salad only to be presented with some ingredients, a chopping board and a knife and having to create the dish yourself. The essential missing element for the salad is the creativity of the chef. The missing element in a thesis is the argument, the red thread, that guides a reader along a narrative path. The argument is a justification for addressing a research problem or gap using a particular approach to gather suitably robust data, which can be interpreted to answer or at least provide insights into the original problem.
I always found this mid-level narrative very difficult to teach effectively. I think this was due to the fact that it is the point of transfer of agency or ownership of knowledge. EAP teacher and research student are in a partnership with different kinds of knowledge: understanding and display of how texts work for the EAP teacher versus understanding research methodologies and what counts as data and evidence for the research student. I would get to a point with many students where I realised I couldn’t help them further because neither they nor I could actually make the leap from the generic texts I was using to demonstrate the macro and mid-level structures to discipline-specific texts they would have to read and then write.
I made a couple of published attempts to show the red thread through a section of a research article. In EAP Essentials, chapter 2 (p.64-6 of 2nd edition) I analysed the introduction to my own masters dissertation to compare a genre analysis (using Swales CARS model) with an analysis of the argument (problem-solution-evaluation) to show how the functional analysis provides detail of the argument in the review of previous studies, which is not captured at the level of the genre analysis.
In Access EAP: Frameworks (Unit 9 section 3, p. 240-49) I analysed two papers on the academic performance of Internationally Mobile Students (IMS) – a topic I thought would interest the IMS in my class. This critical evaluation attempted to show how research concepts are operationalised in research design, what methods are used and whether these lead to robust data, which can be used to support claims in the final discussion section of the report. Throughout the analysis, the students are guided to adopt a position of reasonable scepticism in order to evaluate the evidence and claims based on their own experience. This was as close as I could get to providing insights into the narrative arguments in a research publication.
References
Alexander, O., Argent, S. & Spencer, J.A. (2018). EAP Essentials (2nd Ed.) Reading: Garnet Education.
Argent, S & Alexander, O. (2013) Access EAP: Frameworks. Reading: Garnet Education.
EAP Essentials 