https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9706-0074
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ABSTRACT
The supervision of degree theses is one of several institutional practices in higher education that are regulated by various systems of rules. However, the social roles involved in the practices may still be largely based on interpretation, negotiation and personal choice. Research on supervision has primarily targeted the doctoral level, but the present study targets the Bachelor level. Existing inventories of roles are based on supervisor roles, but the present study also includes student roles. Existing inventories are not always based on empirical data, but the present study uses focus group discussions with supervisors and responses to open-ended questions from a questionnaire to students as a basis for extracting supervisor and student roles. The supervisor and student participants came from two language departments at a Swedish university. The local guidelines relevant to supervision underspecify roles. The findings show a considerable complexity and a broad repertoire when it comes to roles attributed to supervisors as well as students. Some roles may be plotted along a scale, where stakeholders may have different preferences and needs, such as along transactional and interactional types, or between support and management; or between seeing the thesis primarily as a process or a product.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback, which has helped up improve the quality of the article. Any remaining shortcomings remain our own responsibility.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Cf. the Oxford English Dictionary’s fourth sense of ‘role’: “The characteristic or socially expected behaviour pattern of any person with a certain identity or status in a particular social setting or environment”.
2 Swedish ‘forskare’, ‘ledare’ and ‘tjänsteman’.
4 References to local sources are not supplied to avoid revealing the name of the university.
5 In the examples, ‘Supervisor’ means it is a supervisor speaking, while ‘Student’ means it is a student writing. ‘1’ is for Subject 1, ‘2’ for Subject 2. ‘Tr’ indicates a translation from Swedish. Key words for the semantic analysis have been underlined.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Annelie Ädel
Annelie Ädel is professor of English Linguistics at Dalarna University, Sweden. Her linguistic research is largely applied and focused on how communication works in the academic sector, in teaching as well as in research. She has studies communication forms such as student theses, student spoken presentations, teachers’ written feedback, academic lectures and the research article. She has many years of experience supervising student theses.
Julie Skogs
Julie Skogs is senior lecturer in English Linguistics at Dalarna University, Sweden. Her research is mostly applied and focuses on how communication works in e-learning contexts. She is a certified ‘Excellent teacher’ with teaching experience above all in grammar, academic writing, methodology and thesis supervision.
Charlotte Lindgren
Charlotte Lindgren is senior lecturer in Education, focusing on French, at the Department of Pedagogy, Didactics and Education Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is a certified ‘Excellent teacher’ since 2015. Her teaching is currently focused on subject didactics and further education/lifelong learning in French. She has also conducted research on children’s literature from a range of different perspectives.
Monika Stridfeldt
Monika Stridfeldt is senior lecturer in French at Dalarna University, Sweden. Her research focuses among other things on learners’ pronunciation and perception of spoken French, as well as on oral interaction in net-based language studies in higher education.