A Guide to Supervising Non-Native English Writers of Theses and Dissertations ─ Focusing on the Writing Process

A growing number of students who are non-native speakers of English are enrolled in Masters and Ph.D. programs at universities across the world where English is the language of communication. These students often encounter difficulties when writing a thesis or dissertation in English— primarily understanding the requirements and expectations of the new academic context and the conventions of academic writing. Focused on the writing process,A Guide to Supervising Non-native English Writers of Theses and Dissertations presents accounts of writing difficulties and issues from both supervisors’ and students’ perspectives, identifies key issues, offers a synthesis and critical appraisal of a range of published approaches to addressing them, and provides hands-on, tested, practical solutions. Designed for easy use by writing supervisors, this concise guide relates practical approaches tospecific writing issues (relationship between reading for and preparing to write up part-genres; creating arguments; making and evaluating claims, judgements and conclusions; coherence and cohesion; generic and discipline-specific writing conventions). Numerous textual samples from students illustrate actual writing difficulties and how supervisors worked towards solutions

John Bitchener is Professor of Applied Linguistics, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.