This study documents the development of an assessment (a multiple-choice test with free text rationale) built into an academic skills module over a 2 year period. Initially introduced as a credit bearing assessment to promote student engagement, disappointing results in the first year prompted a further intervention in year 2 with an additional…

Writing is central to PhD work, though often a source of challenge, given the dissertation is the basis for the award of the degree. Universities may offer writing workshops, but these frequently take a remedial, skills-based approach: writing as something to fix rather than a developmental life-learning process of gaining confidence and fluency…

Academic blogs are international, extramural, outside of institutional structure, obligation, and audit. Their algorithms allow quantitative investigation, but qualitative research on blog practice is rare. This paper offers qualitative insight into academic blog pedagogy using "DoctoralWriting" as a case study. Here,…

Success in higher education relates in part to competence in the medium of instruction. But the academic literacy literature provides compelling evidence that competence in the medium of instruction is insufficient to ensure success. Crucially, students need to take on the literacy practices of the discipline or field. This study offers a thematic…

PhD researchers are increasingly working in non-academic sectors, garnering interest in the extent to which doctoral education is relevant for careers beyond academia. Writing, arguably the most important and challenging activity PhDs must master, is a skill also coveted in the knowledge economy, required of employees across labour sectors. Using…

Our purpose in this study is to propose a voice model which provides a framework to analyse how student writers construct their authorial identities through the voices they employ in their texts and to test the effectiveness of the Lehman's rubric design as a measure of authorial voice. The voice model, which features individualised, collective…

Supervisory feedback is crucial for students to accomplish graduate research and learn from the process. Despite its importance, supervisory feedback on master's theses has been under-researched. This article presents the findings of a mixed-methods study that examined supervisory feedback on English medium master's theses in the…

Loss aversion has been shown to influence decision making in a host of social and economic contexts. This paper presents a novel assessment strategy that seeks to address issues of student engagement and academic integrity through the combination of the concepts of loss aversion and peer-assessment. Students faced the possibility of losing a small…

Although dissertations have traditionally been part of master's programmes, non-dissertation track master's programmes are on the rise across the world. This paper reports faculty views on MA TESOL dissertations (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) in five Anglophone countries. Drawing on the academic literacies tradition and informed…

In this case study research, we examine online supervision and engagements in a blended education doctorate (EdD) programme through a lens of relational trust. Interviews with supervisors and EdD graduates enabled us to examine practices and strategies used to cultivate relationships and learning alliances that supported doctoral candidates in…

Senior-year admitted students (SYAS) in Hong Kong, similar to community college transfer students in the U.S., refers to a cohort of sub-degree programme graduates who are admitted to a top-up bachelor's degree programme. Despite increasing SYAS intakes in Hong Kong universities, published studies on the teaching of SYAS are still scarce. This…

We draw on Bakhtin's dialogic construct of 'double-voicedness' to explore Chinese international doctoral students' responses to their non-Chinese supervisors' language feedback and their reasoning of the responses. Results show that the students respond to supervisors' language feedback in four ways: no revision, faithful revision, extended…