UNDERSTANDING STUDENT WRITING: ISSUES IN COMBINING TEXT ANALYSES AND DISCOURSE- BASED INTERVIEWS
INTRODUCTION
Due to the globalization in higher education, more ESL and EFL students today study their subject programmes in English-medium universities. It has been shown that these students face considerable difficulties in coursework writing in English (Davis, 2013); therefore, investigation of their writing process and/or products is of great importance. For such investigation, currently it is considered good practice to triangulate the researcher’s analyses of student texts with students’ self-reported perceptions on their own texts (e.g., Davis, 2013; Green, 2013). In reality, a number of issues might arise in analysing and presenting data from these two interrelated but different methods. This paper will summarise the methodological challenges that emerged in a doctoral study on Chinese master’s
students’ use of sources in a UK university, including its pilot stage. The first challenge was selecting the citation instances in texts to discuss in interviews, given the time constraints and the incompleteness of text analysis at that stage. The second challenge regarded the interviewing techniques: how to generate students’ real perceptions without influence from the text analysis categories. The third challenge was attempting to link the results of text analysis with interview data. Discussing these issues can inform future studies of this nature.
OVERVIEW OF THE DESIGN OF THE STUDY
The study collected 9 MA TESOL and 1 MA Applied Linguistics students’ written coursework at 3 stages during their 1-year taught programme (28 texts, due to 2