Abstract
Writing in academia is not only a way for students to acquire knowledge and skills, but also a process through which they construct author/researcher identity. This study aims to explore how twenty MSc. students construct their identity as writers of research papers. The students in this study received genre-based writing instructions on writing research papers during their writing course in the first semester of university. They wrote four papers during the semester, and the researcher provided feedback to their papers. Then, they were interviewed individually in order to find out how they reacted to the instructions, the writing process, and the feedback provided by the teacher. In addition, they were requested to write a reflective piece of writing about what they experienced including their emotions, thoughts and opinions about writing an academic paper before and after the course. Two types of analyses were made. Firstly, their sample research papers were examined during the course to see if there were improvements in the areas where feedback was provided. Secondly, the interviews and reflective pieces of writing were subjected to content analysis in order to extract themes. The examination of the papers revealed that the feedback provided by the teacher was effective as the writings improved in the areas where feedback was given. The thematic analysis resulted in two major themes of Affect and Attitude and the Need for Adaptation. An important implication of this study was the role feedback played in helping student/researchers to develop their identity in writing.
Highlights
Writing is an important skill to learn in graduate and post-graduate education in Iran (Kotamjani & Hussin, 2017)
An important implication of this study was the role feedback played in helping student/researchers to develop their identity in writing
It was higher in the second round of assignments; their last assignments received the lowest amount of feedback compared to the other two areas; namely, sentence structure and move structure
Summary
Writing is an important skill to learn in graduate and post-graduate education in Iran (Kotamjani & Hussin, 2017). Students are part of research projects, and they are mostly responsible for writing and publishing these studies. Being able to defend dissertations and graduate with a PhD requires the students to publish at least one ISI paper (Cargill et al, 2018; Huang, 2010; Li, 2016). This requirement could be more than one ISI and several non-ISI publications depending on the institutions, faculties or departments. Applying to universities abroad requires students to have some published articles in their CVs to demonstrate their research skills and abilities
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