Abstract
This chapter presents a qualitative study of the dimensions of the self in semi-structured interviews with students from European universities, who shared their experiences of writing Bachelor’s and Master’s theses at local universities. The study, undertaken to enhance the understanding of learning and writing practices at the tertiary level, was based on the discursive analysis of student writing narratives revealed through the research interview accounts. The concept of self was approached as a combination of autonomous writer’s voice and aspiring academic identity performed in university-related contexts. The findings show that the thesis writer’s self reveals four major dimensions, influenced by important aspects of their writing journeys: uncertainty of competence as academic writers, emotionally loaded situations affecting writing, supervisory relationships, and personal efforts to overcome difficulties.
Keywords
- The self
- Thesis writing
- Supervision
- Ethnography
- Research interview
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Agar, M. (2006). An ethnography by any other name …. Forum: Qualitative Social Research Sozialforschung, 7(4), art. 36.
Atkinson, P., & Silverman, D. (1997). Kundera’s immortality: The interview society and the invention of the self. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(3), 304–325.
Berger, A. A. (1997). Narratives in popular culture, media, and everyday life. Sage.
Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605054407.
De Fina, A. (2009). Narratives in interview—The case of accounts: For an interactional approach to narrative genres. Narrative Inquiry, 19(2), 233–258. https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.19.2.03def.
DiCicco-Bloom, B., & Crabtree, B. F. (2006). The qualitative research interview. Medical Education, 40, 314–321. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2929.2006.02418.x.
Elbow, P. (1981). Writing with power. Oxford University Press.
Ferrari, L., & Gallardo, S. (2006). Estudio diacrónico de la evaluación en las introducciones de artículos científicos de medicina. Revista Signos, 39(61), 161–180.
Gere, A. R. (Ed.). (2019). Developing writers in higher education. University of Michigan Press.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford California Press.
González-Ocampo, G., & Castelló, M. (2018). How do doctoral students experience supervision? Studies in Continuing Education, 41(3), 293–307. https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037X.2018.1520208.
Hall, S. (1996). Introduction: Who needs “identity”? In S. Hall & P. du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity (pp. 1–17). Sage.
Hammersley, M. (2003). Recent radical criticism of interview studies: Any implications for the sociology of education? British Journal of Sociology of Education, 24, 119–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425690301906.
Harwood, N., & Petrić, B. (2017). Experiencing master’s supervision: Perspectives of international students and their supervisors. Routledge.
Hyland, K. (1994). Hedging in academic writing and EAP textbooks. English for Specific Purposes, 13(3), 239–256. https://doi.org/10.1016/0889-4906(94)90004-3.
Hyland, K. (2008). Disciplinary voices: Interactions in research writing. English Text Construction, 1(1), 5–22. https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.1.1.03hyl.
Hyvärinen, M. (2008). Analyzing narratives and story-telling. In P. Alasuutari, L. Bickman, & J. Brannen (Eds.), The Sage handbook of social research methods (pp. 447–460). Sage.
Ivanič, R. (1998). Writing and identity: The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. Benjamins.
Ivanič, R., & Camps, D. (2001). I am how I sound: Voice as self-representation in L2 writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 10(1–2), 3–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1060-3743(01)00034-0.
Kvale, S. (2006). Dominance through interviews and dialogues. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(3), 480–500. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800406286235.
Kvale, S., & Brinkmann, S. (2009). InterViews: Learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing (2nd ed.). Sage.
Lee, Y.-L., & Roth, M.-W. (2004). Making a scientist: Discursive “doing” of identity and self-presentation during research interviews. Forum: Qualitative Sozialforschung, 5(1), Art. 12. Retrieved from http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/655/1419
Mann, S. (2011). A critical review of qualitative interviews in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 32(1), 6–24. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amq043.
Martin, J. R., & White, R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan.
Martinez, I. A. (2005). Native and non-native writers’ use of first person pronouns in the different sections of biology research articles in English. Journal of Second Language Writing, 14(3), 174–190. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2005.06.001.
Masschelein, A., Meurée, C., Martens, D., & Vanasten, S. (2014). The literary interview: Toward a poetics of a hybrid genre. Poetics Today, 35(1–2), 1–49. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2648368.
Matsuda, P. K. (2015). Identity in written discourse. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 140–159. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190514000178.
Mishler, E. G. (1997). The interactional construction of narratives in medical and life-history interviews. In B.-L. Gunnarsson, P. Linell, & B. Nordberg (Eds.), The construction of professional discourse (pp. 223–244). Longman.
Newkirk, T. (1997). The performance of self in student writing. Boynton/Cook.
Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Social processes and educational practice. Longman.
Norton, B. (2011). Identity. In J. Simpson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of Applied Linguistics (pp. 318–330). Routledge.
Ochs, E., & Capps, L. (1996). Narrating the self. Annual Review of Anthropology, 25, 19–43. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.25.1.19.
Paltridge, B., & Woodrow, I. (2012). Thesis and dissertation writing: Moving beyond the text. In R. Tang (Ed.), Academic writing in a second or foreign language: Issues and challenges facing ESL/EFL academic writers in higher education contexts (pp. 88–104). Continuum.
Pekrun, R., Goetz, T., & Perry, R. P. (2002). Academic emotions in students’ self-regulated learning and achievement: A program of qualitative and quantitative research. Educational Psychologist, 37(2), 91–105. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326985EP3702_4.
Petrić, B. (2010). Students’ conceptions of voice in academic writing. In R. Lorés-Sanz, P. Mur-Dueňas, & E. Lafuente-Millán (Eds.), Constructing interpersonality: Multiple perspectives and applications to written academic genres (pp. 325–336). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Richardson, L. (1990). Writing strategies: Reaching diverse audiences. Sage.
Salager-Meyer, F. (1994). Hedges and textual communicative function in medical English written discourse. English for Specific Purposes, 13(2), 149–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/0889-4906(94)90013-2.
Shotter, J. (1993). Conversational realities: Constructing life through language. Sage.
Shuck, G. (2010). Language identity, agency and context: The shifting meanings of “multilingual.”. In M. Cox, J. Jordan, & C. Ortmeier-Hooper (Eds.), Reinventing identities in second language writing (pp. 117–138). National Council of Teachers of English.
Starfield, S., & Ravelli, L. J. (2006). “The writing of this thesis was a process that I could not explore with the positivistic detachment of the classical sociologist”: Self and structure in New Humanities research theses. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5(3), 222–243. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2006.07.004.
Steuer, R., & Wood, T. (2008). Storytellers and their discursive strategies in a post-acquisition process. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 21(5), 574–588. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810810903225.
Strauss, P. (2012). “The English is not the same”: Challenges in thesis writing for second language speakers of English. Teaching in Higher Education, 17, 283–293. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2011.611871.
Tardy, C. (2012). Current conceptions of voice. In K. Hyland & C. Sancho Guinda (Eds.), Stance and voice in written academic genres (pp. 34–48). Palgrave Macmillan.
Wiles, J., Rosenberg, M., & Kearns, R. (2005). Narrative analysis as a strategy for understanding interview talk in geographic research. Area, 37(1), 89–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2005.00608.x.
Wodak, R. (2015). Critical discourse analysis, discourse-historical approach. In K. Tracy, T. Sandel, & C. Ilie (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of language and social interaction. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ruth_Wodak/publication/280621881_Critical_Discourse_Analysis_Discourse-Historical_Approach/links/55bf4c7008ae092e966537d4.pdf.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bekar, M., Yakhontova, T. (2021). Dimensions of Student Writer’s Self in Qualitative Research Interviews. In: Muresan, LM., Orna-Montesinos, C. (eds) Academic Literacy Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62877-2_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62877-2_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62876-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-62877-2
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)