Practices and challenges of learning by co-authoring in the - PDF document

Practices and challenges of learning by co-authoring in the sciences: a multiple-case study of doctoral students and their mentoring advisors Pascal Matzler School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics Good afternoon, and thank you for coming. I’m very pleased to present today here at the 2019 conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL). The title of my presentation today is “Practices and challenges of learning by co -authoring in the sciences: a multiple- case study of doctoral students and their mentoring advisors”. This presentation will summarize my ongoing research project for my PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Auckland, under the guidance of my advisor, Assoc. Prof. Helen Basturkmen. 1

Overview • General aim of the study • Description of case study participants • Data collection methods • Findings • Conclusion Very briefly, this is the structure of my talk today. First, I will describe the general aim of my study, and then I will give a sketch of my participants and a brief summary of my data collection methods. After that, we will have a look at some of the findings and how these findings have informed my conclusions. 2

General aim of the study To better understand how advisors introduce their graduate research students to the practices of writing research articles (RAs) by writing a first RA together: “mentoring by co - authoring” My work is in academic discourse socialization: I am primarily interested in how graduate research students are introduced or socialized to the practices of writing research articles (RAs): In the sciences, this practice is best described as “mentoring by co - authoring”. 3

Literature • ESP Genre Analysis, Disciplinary Discourses (product- oriented) • Ethnographic studies of research writing in the sciences (Latour and Woolgar, 1979, 1986; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Myers, 1990). • Longitudinal text-oriented ethnographic study, Text History (Lillis and Curry, 2006, 2010) • Learning to write for publication: Belcher (1994), Blakeslee (1997), Kamler (2008), Aitchison et al. (2012) • Methodology: Multiple-case study (Duff, 2008), thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) This project draws on a fairly wide range of literature. My analysis of the RA as a textual product is informed by ESP genre analysis as developed by John Swales and others, as well as the work done on Disciplinary Discourses by Ken Hyland. My understanding of the contexts and practices of research writing follows ethnographic studies performed from a sociological or anthropological perspective (e.g., Latour and Woolgar, 1979, 1986; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Myers, 1990). The framework for describing the development of the RA text and the interaction between the co-authors is also informed by the text history approach developed by Lillis and Curry ( 2006, 2010) , as well as some of the existing literature on learning to write for publication in the sciences. Finally, in terms of methodology, I would describe this project as a multiple-case study with an ethnographic orientation, and the main data analysis method is thematic analysis, following Braun and Clarke, among others. 4

Contexts and backgrounds of participants Case Participant Role Main Language(s) 1. Environmental Chet Advisor Italian and Sciences English Tsai Doctoral Student Chinese 2. Neurosciences Barry Advisor English Ramon Doctoral Student Spanish 3: Computational Kate Advisor English Chemistry Leila Doctoral Student Persian This being a multiple-case study, I feel that it is important to give a brief outline of what kinds of people my participants are. I was lucky to recruit three pairs of participants that are diverse in many aspects, such as their L1 and cultural background, age, gender, discipline and level of experience. My first case was in Environmental Sciences: I had an Italian advisor, in his early 50s, who is a world authority in his field, and his Chinese PhD student. They were studying sediment transport in coastal systems. My second case was in Neurosciences: The advisor was from NZ and quite young, whereas the student was from Latin America. They were studying how the brain activates groups of muscles to perform movements. And my third and final case is in Computational Chemistry, with an experienced NZ advisor and her Iranian PhD student, who were using powerful computers to simulate chemical reactions. All three PhD students were at an early-intermediate stage of their PhD: this means they had completed their first year research proposals and had now obtained sufficient results from their experiments to publish a first RA. 5

Data collection – thick description Activity Type of collected data Number Student written products RA draft Email body message 17 Advisor written products Edits suggested / performed on drafts On-script comments or questions Email body message Interviews with Audio recording participants Transcript 12 Log / Memo Observed meetings Audio recording Transcript 15 Log / Memo Annotated copy of draft The data collection for this case study was structured in such a way as to collect evidence through a wide range of channels simultaneously. I collected 17 drafts that the participants exchanged, and, importantly, the feedback that the advisor wrote on each draft, as well as the email messages that they used to exchange the drafts. Finally, I was able to observe and audio-record 15 meetings, so I have meeting transcripts and my own notes and reflections from observing these meetings. I also conducted 12 interviews, consisting of initial background interviews and then member- checking interviews after the participants completed the co-authoring of their RA. The main purpose of performing such a varied (and hopefully thorough) data collection was to arrive at a thick description that is so valued in ethnographic case study research. Thematic analysis was then performed using Atlas.ti qualitative data analysis software. 6

Extract of supervisor annotation on draft Reviewed draft , emailed by Chet back to Tsai: Before I turn to my findings, I would like to show you two examples of the types o data I collected. Firstly, this is a extract of a typical RA draft that was sent by one of the doctoral students to his supervisor. The supervisor, in turn, employed a PDF viewing and mark-up software to annotate the draft, and then returned it by email before scheduling a meeting. Note that the supervisor inscribes the student’s draft in two different ways. The majority of interventions correspond to direct text edits; however, there are also on- script comments consisting of boxed ‘Notes’ which are anchored to the passage of text they refer to (see speech bubble symbol on line 164). Such boxed comments (in this instance invoking reader expectations) typically express deeper or more complex concerns that cannot be resolved by a simple and localised text edit. 7

Extract of an RA draft annotated by the observer during a meeting: The observation of meetings included one additional method of data collection that served as a key link between the observations and the textual data. Before each meeting, I printed out a copy of the latest draft version (often containing supervisor edits or comments performed only minutes earlier). During the observed meeting, I manually annotated these printed drafts with time stamps, notable utterances, observations and reflections on events in the meeting. Notably, the participants tended to discuss and intervene their RA in often fragmented and recurring episodes, rather than by linearly following an established pattern or organisation. By manually annotating the latest draft during meetings, particularly with time stamps, I was able to map the flow of discussions and text interventions performed by the participants during their meetings onto the printed draft the text, and to later reconstruct these activities during transcription and data analysis. These annotated printed copies therefore provide a key link between RA drafts and meeting transcripts. 8

Mentoring by co-authoring is normal • Science PhDs write Ras before / instead of the thesis • RAs are based on experiments or simulations performed by student in the PhD. • Co-authoring is common in all three studied disciplines “We are co -authors, we always do it together. I don’t think any student would ever even think of publishing without me, because, I mean, it’s work that we do together.” (Chet, Interview 1.D) Most research into doctoral writing practices has focused on the arts and humanities, where advisors will provide both oral and written feedback on student drafts of chapters or sections of the actual thesis (see, e.g. Belcher, 1994). In the sciences, however, the main writing activity (and therefore the main venue of discourse socialization) is the research article (RA). In this multiple-case study, all three students were preparing an RA based on experiments or simulations conducted in their PhD programme. All six participants, both students and advisors, declared that co-authoring RAs between students and advisors constitute normal practice in their respective disciplines. For example Chet, the advisor in Case 1 (Environmental Sciences), found it hard to imagine a different arrangement. [see quote] Because the advisor is also a co-author of the RA, he or she contributes both 9

indirectly and directly to the writing, a practice that raises important questions of ownership, motivation, and power relationships. 9