Understanding equivocal feedback in PhD supervision meetings: a conversation analysis approach

ABSTRACT

A significant proportion of the teaching and learning in PhD programs is conducted independently by the candidate under the supervision of one or more supervisors. Supervisors and students are usually expected to meet regularly to ensure that students are on track to produce a dissertation as independent researchers. Yet few studies to date examine how teaching and learning within supervision meetings is interactionally achieved. In this paper we use a conversation analysis approach to study how supervisors formulate their student-solicited feedback. Specifically, we show that equivocation in giving feedback serves a pedagogical purpose that balances competition between the institutional goals of teaching with the expectations that PhD students should already be competent researchers. While supervisors provided equivocal feedback in both early and late stages of candidature, we show here how the nature of this feedback changes, showing the sensitivities of supervisors to the developing capacities of their supervisees.

KEYWORDS:

• Conversation analysis
• PhD supervision meeting
• equivocal feedback
• early and late stages of candidature

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 While there may be aspects of the supervision that are sensitive to the fact that supervision meetings are often intercultural, with one or more participants using English as a second language, there did not seem to be any systematic relationship between this and the kinds of epistemic management practices we observed.

2 The analysis of feedback we present here was developed using the whole corpus. However in the interests of simplicity the selected data extracts we present in this publication come from just three recordings including students undertaking education research: two at early stage and one at late stage of candidature.