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Hsu & Kuo, 2006; Lee, 2008). However, the contribution of the study was that the
students encountered not only the writing difficulties but also the problems about research design and data analysis. Furthermore, the students had both linguistic and rhetoric
obstacles when writing different sections of a thesis. What’s more, the sections posed different degree of difficulties to the students, for the cognitive demands needed to meet the rhetorical structures of different sections varied.
Since the students faced linguistic and different rhetoric troubles while writing different sections, they employed correspondent strategies by utilizing available materials as academic publications and human resources like peers, colleagues, and experts in their environment to deal with above problems. Using van Lier’s (2004) notion of expanded ZPD, the students received the assistance from not simply experts but also from more capable peers, peers with equal ability, and even the self. The researcher also found that the ETMA students tended to deal with the difficulties they encountered before and during thesis writing by self; that is, reading relevant texts. If the problems were still unsolved, they came to discuss with peers or consult experts.
5.4 Pedagogical Implications
To facilitate the L2 graduate students’ thesis writing process in EFL contexts, this study yields five important pedagogical implications. First of all, providing more opportunities for the ETMA students to read academic publications extensively in the courses is suggested, as the research about graduate students’ theses composing process (Shaw, 1991) has resonated the necessity of designing curriculum based on students’
learning strategies. According to the findings, the students tended to deal with the linguistic and rhetorical difficulties in thesis writing through reading relevant books, research articles, and theses to attain knowledge about their research topic and thesis writing directly or deduce the conventions of thesis writing. Thus, the curriculum design
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of the courses in graduate school should base on the strategies the ETMA students adopted to achieve their learning goals. In addition, as Shaw (1991) argued, the teachers’
role is to create environments for the students themselves to develop their own understanding and uncover the regulations of thesis writing from the academic publications.
Second, the difficulties before and during writing indicated by the students suggest the need of enhancing the chance of practicing these problematic parts, such as how to manage the statistic software to analyze data and how to arrange the literature logically in Literature Review in class. Given that the L2 graduate students need more practice, especifically in the sections of a thesis which are perceived to be more challenging to the students than other sections (Buckingham, 2008), the instructor of the thesis writing course should put more emphasis on these challenging sections and let students utilize the knowledge learned from the class by practicing writing a complete thesis or research article instead of simply writing a thesis proposal. It follows that more credit hours should be given to teach this course, through which to make teachers have more time available to assign the task of writing a complete thesis to students. Furthermore, the instructors of thesis writing courses can consider the findings of the study, including the difficulties students may have in writing each section of a thesis, factors attributing to these difficulties, and correspondent coping strategies when designing the curriculum and in practical teaching. Since the students also mentioned their troubles in designing research and analyzing data, the instructor of the statistic class should make sure the students know how to relate the way of analysis to specific research questions and know how to manage the statistic software to do specific kind of data analysis by providing some hands-on practice to them.
Third, the findings that the students do need more instruction from the experts to accumulate the understanding of the conventions of thesis writing suggest that
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personalized feedback or consulting on the assignments of thesis writing practice in the thesis writing course is needed, as claimed by Yeh (2010). By doing so, the students may not only receive feedback fine-tuned to their own writings from their advisors but have more opportunities to obtain personalized suggestions from other experts. Furthermore, the problematic parts of a thesis may be diminished during the personalized consultation with the course instructor and then the students can write in a smooth manner when they have to write their theses independently.
Fourth, since the study revealed that the students would ask help from peers, the course instructors are suggested to implement group discussion as part of curricular design or to encourage students to form study groups in or after the class. According to the criteria of choosing peers disclosed from the findings, the course instructors can group together the students who have homogeneous or heterogeneous English and research writing abilities or the students who conduct similar studies. By doing so, the difficulties the students encounter may be solved by the assistance of more capable peers or
alleviated by the shared ideas of peers with equal ability.
In addition to the implications for the course design of graduate schools, this study also yields suggestions to the advising process. According to the data obtained from teachers’ and students’ interviews, the graduate students who are novice research writers needed their advisors’ assistance to meet the genre expectation of the academic
environment. Hence, the advisors should remind their advisees of the general problematic parts of specific sections before the present advisees begin to write. Then, the advisees can avoid making the common mistakes. What’s more, based upon the needs of their advisees, the advisors should suggest some useful and available resources to those new comers of academic community, such as the senior students’ theses provided by the program and the writing centers of the university.
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