Maintaining textuality: a case study of the problematic use of academic discourse conventions in the thesis text of an international graduate student

Abstract

Supervising research students in the writing up of their theses may present special difficulties when these students do not come from an English speaking background (NESBs). Very often, the textual problems are attributed by both supervisors and students to “problems with English”. My purpose in presenting this representative case study is to show that 1) the major problems in the text examined are due to the student’s misapprehensions about and inadequate command of the institutionalized conventions of thesis writing; 2) these problems are crosscultural; 3) such phrases as “problems with English” are reductive in that they obscure full recognition and acknowledgment of the complexity of the writing culture students enter and its cultural constructedness; and 4) there is a need to decontextualize our language in communicating with NESBs about their texts if we are to help them master a very complex range of discourse conventions.