Theme choices in Czech University students’ English-medium Master's theses

Dontcheva-Navratilová, Olga; Jančaříková, Renata; Hůlková, Irena; Schmied, Josef

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102892

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…However, other areas essential to writing a successful Master's thesis, such as evaluation and interpretation of results, conveying personal viewpoints and communicating with the reader or acknowledging research limitations, were ascribed a somewhat lower importance by the students, suggesting the existence of a divergence between the students' 'wants' and 'lacks'. The findings concerning the students' perception of the writing process also concur with the finding of the authors' previous research (Dontcheva et al 2020) into the Theme zone in Czech students' Master's theses, which has indicated that Czech Master's students tend to overuse textual Themes expressed by linkers and underuse interpersonal Themes realised by stance devices.…”

supporting

confidence: 88%

“…The investigation studied the frequency of occurrence and realisations of the three types of Themes conveying the primary language functions (ideational, textual and interpersonal, Halliday & Matthiessen 2014): (i) topical Themes communicating main ideas and concepts, (ii) textual Themes indicating logical relations, and (iii) interpersonal Themes positioning the writer towards the content conveyed and the reader (Eggins 2004, Hannay 2007, Thompson 2014. The results of our investigation (Dontcheva-Navratilova et al 2020) indicate that although Czech students tend to abide by the formality, explicitness and clarity requirements in academic discourse and have an awareness of the crucial role that the Theme zone plays in the build-up of discourse coherence, they show a strong tendency to use only simple and two-component Theme patterns (Textual + Topical, and Interpersonal + Topical), overuse textual Themes and underuse interpersonal Themes.…”

Section: Linguistic Analysis Of Students' Written Discoursementioning

confidence: 71%

“…an academic style feature that can also be enhanced by an adequate expression of textual Themes studied in our previous investigation (cf. Dontcheva-Navratilova et al 2020). Grammar (2.1) and academic vocabulary (2) were still perceived by students rather as weaknesses, although both are traditionally listed among features typical of academic style (Bennett 2009).…”

Section: Questionnaire Results: Academic Writing -Needs and Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The linguistic analysis of the students' written discourse is informed by our previous investigation (Dontcheva-Navratilova et al 2020) carried out on a specialised learner corpus comprising 48 Master's theses written by Czech university students in the period 2010-2018 representing the following disciplines: linguistics, literature and cultural studies, and ELT methodology. The Master's theses corpus (MT corpus), totalling one million words after all the texts were cleaned so as to exclude all citations, examples and tables, was built by means of the software SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al 2004), which was also used in the analysis.…”

Section: Needs Analysis and Academic Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An Academic Writing Needs Analysis of Czech University Graduate Students

Jančaříková

Povolná

Dontcheva-Navratilová

et al. 2020

D&I

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The present paper presents the results of a needs analysis conducted among Czech students involved in a Master’s degree programme English Language Teacher Education. The aim was to identify their academic writing needs on the basis of a needs analysis questionnaire and a linguistic analysis of their written discourse in order to find out whether there are divergences between their ‘wants’ and ‘lacks’ (Hutchinson & Waters 1987). The results indicate that the students’ previous tuition at Bachelor’s level focused primarily on lexico-grammatical features of academic style such as text organizing devices, academic vocabulary, grammatical structures and citation styles. However, other areas essential to writing a successful Master’s thesis, such as evaluation and interpretation of results, conveying personal viewpoints and communicating with the reader or acknowledging research limitations, were ascribed a somewhat lower importance by the students, suggesting the existence of a divergence between the students’ ‘wants’ and ‘lacks’. The findings concerning the students’ perception of the writing process also concur with the finding of the authors’ previous research (Dontcheva et al. 2020) into the Theme zone in Czech students’ Master’s theses, which has indicated that Czech Master’s students tend tooveruse textual Themes expressed by linkers and underuse interpersonal Themes realised by stance devices.

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supporting

confidence: 88%

Section: Linguistic Analysis Of Students' Written Discoursementioning

confidence: 71%

Section: Questionnaire Results: Academic Writing -Needs and Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Needs Analysis and Academic Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

An Academic Writing Needs Analysis of Czech University Graduate Students

Jančaříková

Povolná

Dontcheva-Navratilová

et al. 2020

D&I

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“…firstly, however, for example) and underuse interpersonal Themes (e.g. surprisingly, to my mind, of course) (Dontcheva-Navratilova et al, 2020). This suggests that the Master's theses of Czech graduate students show typical features of learner discourse, especially as far as the overuse of textual Themes is concerned (e.g.…”

Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 91%

Process genre approach to L2 academic writing: An intervention study

Hanušová¹,

Dontcheva-Navratilová²,

Vališová³

et al. 2020

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The paper presents the research study of academic writing of Czech university students in an English Language Teacher Education study program. The authors apply an interdisciplinary approach integrating the perspectives of linguistics and language pedagogy in the evaluation of the design of the Academic Writing course and its impact on the development of students’ academic writing skills. Adopting a process genre approach (Badger, White, 2000) to writing instruction as a key design principle, our study combines the genre analysis framework (Swales, 1990) and the intercultural rhetoric perspective (Connor, 2004) to design an innovated academic writing course for graduate students focusing on developing critical thinking skills and context-aware writing. The course, informed by an analysis of the academic writing needs of the students, aimed at familiarizing them with the rhetorical structure of academic texts with a focus on the genre of the Master’s thesis and at introducing them to the academic writing conventions in the area of soft sciences. Piloted in 2019, the course was implemented as a blended course, where the contact sessions were complemented by online support in VLE Moodle. Apart from analyses of written texts, classroom writing, and homework tasks, it also included discourse editing tasks and peerreviewing with peer-reviewer feedback and teacher feedback. We believe that our research findings will shed light on the potential of academic writing courses based on the process-genre approach to contribute to the enhancement of the quality of English academic texts by non-native academic writers, and specifically Czech graduate students.

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