Monograph v. manuscript: exploring the factors that influence English L1 and EAL candidates’ thesis-writing approach

ABSTRACT

Writing a doctoral thesis with publications or by publication (TBP) has become an increasingly popular choice for PhD candidates seeking a competitive edge in the post-doctoral job market. However, many candidates continue to write traditional chapter monographs. While research into the TBP has steadily grown over the past two decades, there remains few studies examining candidates’ decision to write traditional theses. Further, despite the widely documented increase of international candidates pursuing their PhDs in OECD countries, there is very limited research examining what role, if any, a candidate’s language background has on the thesis-medium decision. The present study seeks to explore the factors both ‘native’ English (L1) and English as an Additional Language (EAL) candidates consider when choosing which thesis-writing approach to adopt. It reports on questionnaire data from 75 PhD candidates, supported with qualitative interview data from fourteen of those candidates and four doctoral supervisors. We found that EAL candidates were almost twice as likely to pursue a TBP whereas their English L1 peers equally pursued the two thesis-writing approaches. We report in depth on the reasons candidates cite for their chosen approach and discuss how an understanding of their decision-making process may better inform doctoral candidate orientation, support and training.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral education
• thesis by publication
• thesis monograph
• higher degree research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Researchers have, however, investigated EAL candidates’ thesis-writing experiences (e.g., Dong, 1998; Shaw, 1991).

2 Arguably, the majority of the EAL participants in our study who chose the TBP approach were from the Sciences, so these results are somewhat expected. However, despite the small sample size, these findings provide some insight into one of the largest groups of EAL PhD candidates at our university. Specifically, more than a third of all PhD candidates from our university are studying in the Sciences, and of those, 62% are international students.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Macquarie University: [Grant Number Internal Project Grant].