RESEARCH WRITING: FROM ELUSIVE PEDAGOGY TO EXCLUSIVE PEDAGOGY

Recent years have seen an increased attention being given to thesis and dissertation writing in the ESP literature. Prior (1995) attributes more to a thesis or a dissertation than its rhetorical structure. He lists the factors which influence decisions students make about the form of their text-the research perspective taken up in the study, the purpose of the text, and the extent to which the students have been given advice on the positioning and organisation of their text, etc. For Paltridge (2002), thesis and dissertation writing is a difficult process for native speaker students and often doubly so for non-native speaker students. ESL students may have the level of language proficiency required for admission to their course of study, but not yet the necessary textual knowledge, genre knowledge and social knowledge (Bhatia, 1999) required of them to succeed in this particular setting. Our students need to be presented with the range of thesis options that might be open to them, and consider the reasons why they might make a particular choice. There is no such a thing as “one size fits all” master's and doctoral thesis. The present paper attempts to look at the pedagogies evolved for teaching research writing.