Abstract
AbstractThis paper focuses on the under-researched genre of PhD supervision meetings (but see Vehviläinen, Sanna. 2009a. Problems in the research problem: Critical feedback and resistance in academic supervision.Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research53[2]. 185–201; Vehviläinen, Sanna. 2009b. Student-initiated advice in academic supervision.Research on Language and Social Interaction42[2]. 163–190; Björkman, Beyza. 2015. PhD supervisor–PhD student interactions in an English-medium Higher Education [HE] setting: Expressing disagreement.European Journal of Applied Linguistics3[2]. 205–229; Björkman, Beyza. 2016. PhD adviser and student interactions as a spoken academic genre. In K. Hyland & P. Shaw [eds.],The Routledge handbook of English for Academic Purposes, 348–361. Oxon: Routledge; Björkman, Beyza. 2017. PhD supervision meetings in an English as a Lingua Franca [ELF] setting: Linguistic competence and content knowledge as neutralizers of institutional and academic power.Journal of English as a Lingua Franca6[1]. 111–139) and investigates knowledge construction episodes in PhD students’ discussions with their supervisors on their co-authored papers. In these meetings, all supervisors and students use English as their lingua franca (ELF). Such supervision meetings are made up of “social negotiation” and “collaborative sense-making,” providing a good base for learning to take place (Vygotsky, L. S. 1978.Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), which in the present context is the “enculturation” of the PhD student into the research community (Manathunga, Catherine. 2014.Intercultural postgraduate supervision: Reimagining time, place and knowledge. New York: Routledge). It is precisely these negotiation and collaborative sense-making practices that the present paper focuses on, in order to investigate knowledge construction practices. While there is an abundance of research in disciplinary knowledge construction and academic literacy practices from cognitive and behavioral sciences, knowledge about novice scholars’ knowledge construction practices is scant in applied linguistics (but see Li, Yongyan. 2006. Negotiating knowledge contribution to multiple discourse communities: A doctoral student of computer science writing for publication.Journal of Second Language Writing15[3]. 159–178). Even less is known about how PhD students may negotiate knowledge construction and engage in meaning-making practices in interaction with their supervisors. The material comprises 11 hours of naturally occurring speech by three supervisors and their students where they discuss the reviewers’ comments they have received from the journal. The predominant method employed here is applied conversation analysis (CA) (Richards, Keith & Paul Seedhouse [eds.]. 2005.Applying conversation analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), which includes both local patterns of interaction as well as “the tensions between [these] local practices and any ‘larger structures’ in which these are embedded, such as conventional membership categories, institutional rules, instructions, accounting obligations, etc.” (Have, Paul ten. 2007.Doing conversation analysis. London: Sage 199). The analyses here aim to show how the PhD supervisors and students discuss the reviewers’ comments with reference to (i) their own disciplinary community of climate science, and (ii) the domestic discourse community of the target journals (see also Li, Yongyan. 2006. Negotiating knowledge contribution to multiple discourse communities: A doctoral student of computer science writing for publication.Journal of Second Language Writing15[3]. 159–178). The preliminary findings of the analyses show a tendency by the PhD students to focus more heavily on the domestic discourse community of the target journals, especially when justifying their methodological choices. The PhD supervisors, on the other hand, base their meaning-making on the conventions of the disciplinary community of climate science, pointing out broader disciplinary community practices. These findings, highlighting a need to focus on novice scholars’ meaning-making efforts, can be used to inform PhD supervision in general.
Highlights
Academic settings have always been, and will continue being, home to high-stakes interactions where speakers need to communicate effectively in a variety of spoken academic genres
Within the time they are given for project completion, they are expected to engage in socialization to the research community, and join the knowledge construction practices of their research community, “[contributing] to the advancement of knowledge in their disciplines” (Delamont et al 1994)
While there may be differences in other geographies, we can safely suggest that this is the general picture for western and most parts of Europe. This process of socialization has been described as a “psychological transition” (Ziman 1993; cited in Larivière 2012: 464) from being in a position where one is instructed on existing knowledge that is known to the research community to a state where one is expected to start contributing with new knowledge, joining in the community’s knowledge construction practices
Summary
Academic settings have always been, and will continue being, home to high-stakes interactions where speakers need to communicate effectively in a variety of spoken academic genres. The present paper addresses knowledge construction practices by PhD candidates when they are working on joint publications with their supervisors It focuses on the interactions they have with their supervisors in supervision meetings where they are working on interpreting and navigating peer reviewers’ comments they have received from the journal. To date, no study to the author’s knowledge has included interactions between PhD students and their supervisors on how the students interpret peer reviewers’ comments when it comes to knowledge-construction related issues In this sense, the data in the paper is unique, as it provides a window for us to have insights into the actual negotiations between experts and experts-in-the-becoming, taking both the local discourse community of the journal as well as the general scientific community in their domain. This brief paper will be an addition to the previous studies on two accounts: (i) with its data on supervisor and students’ discussions, and (ii) with the interactions where we see the supervisors’ collaborative mentoring role in their co-publications with their students
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