Abstract
This study investigated, by means of an ethnographic approach, what exactly occurs when Japanese novice writers are socialized into the undergraduate thesis genre and how the processes differ among disciplines. Data were collected from 10 undergraduate students enrolled in various humanities disciplines at two Japanese universities. The study identified the genre chains in psychology and non-psychology consisting of the thesis genre and the related genres to capture the whole picture of their socialization processes, and then examined cognitive and sociocultural aspects of their learning. All of the four psychology students were systematically inducted into research and experimental reports, a genre similar to undergraduate theses, in their first 2 years with emphasis on acquisition of knowledge and skills of the research process and report writing, which appear to follow the tradition of the natural sciences. In the last 2 years, the students were then weekly guided by their supervisors specifically in writing their undergraduate thesis in groups. The non-psychology students were socialized into the undergraduate thesis only in the last 2 years, with a particular focus on subject-matter knowledge, which was solely dependent on their supervisors, in the group and/or individual sessions. On the other hand, the psychology students experienced less difficulty in writing their theses than the non-psychology students. The study concludes that the highly prescriptive and regulated training for writing in the disciplinary context at the early stage via the written genres similar to the thesis were likely to account for the psychology students’ success.
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Notes
Genres observed in university settings are referred to as “academic genres” (Bhatia 1993) or “study genres” which are further categorized into written genres (e.g., essays, seminar papers, exams, theses) and spoken genres (e.g., seminars, lectures and consultation hours) (Mauranen 1994). Genres produced in the process of research in particular are also called “research genres” (Swales 2004): for example, research articles; dissertations/theses; thesis defenses; research group meetings (RGMs); colloquia or one-time public presentations; conference presentations; graduate seminars in which oral presentations were delivered; discussion sessions in plenary lectures and poster sessions at a conference (cf. Shalom 1993; Swales 2004; Weissberg 1993).
The term “zemi” is the abbreviated form of “zeminaaru”, coming from German lexicon for “a seminar”. The term refers to either seminars regularly held by a supervisor for his/her undergraduate students to study in a group to help the students to conduct research and successfully write their graduation theses, or to a group of undergraduate students who attend the same such class.
The term refers to the overall organization of written texts. The macro-structure of the written genres related to the undergraduate theses in psychology in this study consisted of the following sections: Introduction, Results, Discussion and Conclusion/Summary (Yamada 2013b).
The lengths of the graduation theses submitted by the four psychology students ranged from 20,000 to 29,000 Japanese characters. All of them were within the character limits required by their disciplines at the two universities.
This manual is written in Japanese and not as extensive as the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA); however, the former frequently refers to the latter within the booklet and adopted the rules from the latter.
In Yamada’s study (2013b) which is also part of the larger project this study is based on, the macro-structures of the graduation theses of the four psychology students resembled and were categorized as the “traditional type”, while those of the non-psychology students’ theses varied (i.e., the traditional type and the topic-based type).
The nature and functions of the zemi are described in detail in Yamada (2013a).
All or parts of the students’ projects or reports were incorporated into their undergraduate theses later and also delivered as oral presentations in the weekly zemi and one-off progress report days.
See Yamada (2009) for the findings of examination of the tape-recorded individual supervisory conference between Ryuji and his supervisor.
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Yamada, K. Cross-Disciplinary Variations: Japanese Novice Writers’ Socialization into the Undergraduate Thesis. Asia-Pacific Edu Res 25, 207–217 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40299-015-0252-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40299-015-0252-3