Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Scholarly publishing has become increasingly important, thanks to the ever intensifying globalisation and marketisation of higher education over the past few decades. The increased valorisation of scholarly publishing is placing researchers under tremendous pressure to publish more and faster. This pressure is also acutely felt by doctoral students, who are increasingly expected to publish during candidature while juggling multiple, and often competing, activities. Although scholarly publishing has garnered increased research attention over the last two decades or so, few studies have focused specifically on scholarly publishing practices during doctoral study.

The present study seeks to bridge this gap by examining six Chinese nursing doctoral students‘ scholarly publishing activities within the context of their doctoral studies. Specifically, it aims to explore the situated contexts and the motives of the major stakeholders (i.e., the university, supervisors, doctoral students) for the doctoral students‘ scholarly publishing activities and the influences of the settings and the motives on their scholarly publishing practices; identify the challenges that the doctoral students faced in their scholarly publishing activities; pinpoint the strategies adopted to cope with their challenges and the consequences of adopting those strategies for them and their scholarly publishing activities.

Drawing upon Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as its theoretical framework, it employed a multiple-case study design and collected multiple types of data from six nursing doctoral students and one supervisor from a major research-intensive university in mainland China. Primary data sources included in-depth interviews, documents and artifacts, and text-based interviews. Both thematic and activity systems analyses were conducted of the collected data, the results of which were synthesised and presented primarily in narratives illustrated with CHAT diagrams.

The results show that the major stakeholders‘ heterogeneous and dynamic motives for scholarly publishing intersected with the complex activity settings for the doctoral students‘ scholarly publishing activity system to impinge upon the doctoral students‘ scholarly publishing practices. The study identifies tensions arising from the duality of the object and subject of the doctoral students‘ scholarly publishing activity system. The object-related tension had to do with the duality of the object of the scholarly publishing and doctoral study activity systems—developing the doctoral students into independent knowledge-contributing researchers while timely graduating them and having their knowledge contributions published—and was reflected in the time pressure they faced in meeting the university‘s publication requirements and the inadequate ongoing, process-oriented support they received from the university and the supervisors. The subject-related tension concerned the duality of the doctoral students‘ role as student/fledgling researchers and as expert/full-fledged researchers and was manifested in their developing but still limited grasp and use of some conceptual tools needed for successful scholarly publishing. The results also reveal that to deal with the aforementioned contradictions, the doctoral students resorted to both boundary crossing—making connections between different activities—and legitimate peripheral participation (LPP)—participating in scholarly publishing with the assistance and mediation of social others and cultural artifacts.

These findings suggest that scholarly publishing during doctoral candidature is a chronotopically laminated, culturally mediated, and socially distributed activity. They also underscore the importance and difficulty of conceiving and designing publishable research, planning and managing research output, and aligning publication with other activities in scholarly publishing during candidature. Limitations of the study, directions for future research, and implications drawn from the findings of this study are discussed in the last chapter.

Previous research has discussed how language use varies across different disciplines and genres in academic writing. While much of the existing research on the subject of disciplinarity has focused on how we can deprivilege some traditional notions of knowledge or has commented briefly on the emergence of a transdisciplinary mode of knowledge production, more research can be done to study the theorising, teaching and learning involved in how writers engage their readers within a discipline. With the growing awareness of how academic discourse is a site for interpersonal negotiation of meaning and dialogistic positioning, this study builds on the prior theories of Engagement, Genre, and Disciplinarity to examine how academics in two different disciplines (Physiology and Pragmatics) engage their readers in two different genres (Research articles and Textbooks).

The study adopts Martin and White’s (2005) ENGAGEMENT system, a subsystem of the APPRAISAL framework as an analytical scheme, and employs a mixed-methods design to understand how disciplinarity and genre can influence a writer’s use of ENGAGEMENT resources and their expression of stance. Building on the notion of genre as that of a specific text-type used by a specific community of speakers, for specific purposes, this study explores the significant differences in characteristic language use between the two disciplines (Physiology and Pragmatics) and two genres (Research articles and Textbooks) through a corpus-based investigation. The corpus comprised 80 Textbook chapters and 80 research articles sampled from the two disciplines. Both corpus-based quantitative and qualitative textual analyses were conducted, with the latter serving to explore and discuss the patterns observed from the quantitative analyses. To augment the quantitative and qualitative textual analyses, author guidelines by the publishers of the respective textbooks and research articles were analysed in search of possible considerations for how ENGAGEMENT resources were used and to shed light on possible preferred styles of writing in academic publishing. Interviews with eight expert informants (four from each of the two disciplines) were conducted to better understand academic writers’ perceptions of writing practices in their respective disciplines.

The study found that regardless of discipline, there were significantly more observed instances of ENGAGEMENT resources in textbooks than in research articles. Surprisingly, there were more observed instances of resources to entertain alternative voices and value positions in textbooks than in research articles. In addition, this study found statistically significant differences due to genre and discipline for how writers use justification in their writing. The results of this study have shed light on how textbooks, an under-studied academic genre, employ the use of ENGAGEMENT resources and how this differs from ENGAGEMENT resources observed in the well-established genre of research articles. The findings from this study are potentially useful to novice writers, EAP writers, college students, as they navigate the intricacies of text production, and explore how authorial practices may differ markedly across disciplines.

This thesis addresses the perceived problems that novices enrolled in a university’s Foundation program face when writing their first academic research project papers. An investigation of the coping strategies used by novices in overcoming these problems should therefore help shed light on how they may be helped to effectively tackle the demands of academic research and academic report writing skills that they require in order to be accepted in the community of practice. The main findings are that novice writers struggle to acquire academic writing literacy and to understand academic writing requirements, expectations and conventions. The study then looks at how a group of novice writers in a foundation programme responded to the demands of completing their first research projects. The thesis is based on the premise that the beliefs and practices of novice writers are shaped by their knowledge repository of what constitutes research and academic writing as well as their nascent knowledge of academia.

The research purpose is formulated as a set of general and specific research questions, as follows:

1. What do research project task prompts require of novice writers? What do novice writers understand of these requirements?

2. How do novice writers frame their research papers? Why do they do so?
 Are there any recurring patterns of discourse organizational structures used by novice writers? If so, what patterns of discourse organizational structures are typical of novice writing?
 How do novice writers achieve the purpose of each sub-genre? How are these rhetorical devices shaped by novice writers’ perceptions?
3. How do novice writers describe their experiences as research writers?

Data for the study constituted 45 research project essays written by two cohorts of students (novice writers) enrolled in a Foundation program at a university in Singapore. This represents a corpus of 175073 words. The study also drew on 14 research project task prompts from a university foundation program, interviews, journal entries and questionnaires which were collected over a period of 2 consecutive years from novice writers.

All 45 research projects were analyzed for overall organizational structures. A core group of 24 research projects were further analyzed for the generic structure (comprising Move and Step analysis) within sub-genres. Strategies that novice writers employed in order to achieve each Move and Step were also analyzed. These analyses were compared with novice writers’ perceptions of research projects and sub-genres, as well as their experiences of literacy practices needed to write the research projects; of how they developed these practices and of what they believed to be the goal of writing research projects.

A lexico-grammatical analysis and generic structure analysis of research project task prompts revealed that despite the authoritarian tone of instructions and the cognitive demands made on novices, the prompts did not alienate the novice writers.

The prompts provided extensive scaffolding on how the task should be approached and carried out. They even imitated the Introduction-Methodology-Results-Discussion structure of research projects. This framework may seem to have shaped the way novices carried out and structured their research projects. The prompts addressed the cognitive demands of the research project tasks to a large extent. But they did not explicate the rhetorical and social demands involved in completing the task. These demands were implicit in the task prompts.

The discourse organizational structure analysis of 45 research projects helped to identify recurring patterns of structural organization and how research projects were framed by novice writers. Novice writers largely used the Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion structure as it allowed them to attend to the prompt in a step by step manner. However, they varied in their interpretation in the manner in which they presented the Results component. The Results sub-genre was often presented as Data Analysis (comprising Discussion and a Proposal). In general, the novices found Introductions and Conclusions easier to write. On the other hand, the Literature Review and Methodology sub-genres were the most rhetorically challenging component.

A closer examination of 24 core research projects revealed that novice writers primarily write to impress their examiners. As such their main driving force in the writing is to show that they have understood the task requirements and have answered them diligently. They do so by addressing the task prompts explicitly in their research projects. The research project is a symbolic end of the research process. Their desire to narrate the research journey is evident in the Conclusion sub-genre which shows that the research process is not merely an academic exercise. It is also an emotional journey.

The meta-text of the research projects provided an in-depth look into the use of Moves by novices. The novice writers’ beliefs about the purpose of each sub-genre shaped the contents of each component. Novice Introduction, Literature Review and Conclusion components tended to be contextualized from experiential knowledge rather than researched knowledge. The Conclusion component was presented partly in a narrative mode to demonstrate how they had developed as researchers and acquired interviewing skills and understood academic writing conventions. Research project papers were primarily considered to be written for the examiner who would be assessing them. Novices then employed several strategies to engage the examiner by sign-posting how they had answered the question and by explicitly referring to their development as academic writers. It was also in the Introduction component that they made several overt references to task requirements.

There is a need to expand the definition of novice writers to include those who are entering academia as they play both the role of a novice and an expert. These researchers could be referred to as embryonic novice researchers. They require more scaffolding to acquire academic research and writing skills. They have an understanding of academic conventions but often choose to foreground experiential knowledge in their essays as they deem that to be the only way through which they can convey to the examiner that it was a poignant process for them. Experiential knowledge plays a dominant role in their research project papers as they consider the writing of the essay to be a cathartic exercise. At the same time, embryonic novice researchers play a dual role of pretending to be an expert who is writing for a wider audience, on the one hand, and as novices writing for the instructor and examiner on the other. The papers also comprise researched knowledge and ‘self-advocacy’ practices, suggesting that the writers believed that the Proposals have a larger impact. These strategies are more reflective of experts writing to ‘join the conversation’ than they are of novices who are merely peripheral participants.

Apart from cognitive, social and rhetorical demands on novice writers, other implicit factors that are not initially evident are self-efficacy and self-regulation among novice writers. Novice writers who had a higher self-esteem as academic writers and greater control over the research process reported fewer difficulties in completing the research and writing the paper. These writers also depended heavily on a supportive network in the university, failing which their beliefs about their capabilities to write the research paper dropped. Primarily, novice writers depended on a supportive network, prior knowledge and experiential knowledge to help them complete the research projects.