[Webinar] Feedback and doctoral student writing

Feedback is an important way through which doctoral students learn the expectations of writing at their particular level of study. It is also through feedback that students are inducted into the community of practice of their discipline. This feedback is provided by the student’s supervisor/s during their period of study as well as by examiners on completion of the degree. While a number of studies have examined supervisor feedback and examiner feedback, a matter that is still underexplored is how supervisors and examiners ask students to make changes to their work and the language they use to do this. This presentation examines the feedback that doctoral students get on their work from both supervisors and examiners. In particular, it examines features of this feedback that students might find difficult to interpret and, as a result, respond to.

Brian Paltridge is a visiting professor in the Department of English at the City University of Hong Kong. He is author of Discourse Analysis (third edition, Bloomsbury, 2021), The Discourse of Peer Review (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and, with Sue Starfield, Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language (second edition, Routledge, 2020) and Getting Published in Academic Journals (University of Michigan Press, 2016). He is currently writing a book with Sue Starfield titled Change and Stability in Thesis and Dissertation Writing to be published by Bloomsbury and, with Matthew Prior, editing The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Discourse. He is an editor emeritus for the journal English for Specific Purposes and a former editor of TESOL Quarterly.