REVIEWING THE LITERATURE: THE GENESIS OF A WRITING COURSE FOR PHD STUDENTS
INTRODUCTION
In the EAP department of a Scottish university, we have for several years offered in-sessional academic writing courses for PhD students at earlier and later stages of their academic journey. However, we felt that the lack of support for students between their initial and final years constituted a large gap in our provision. We therefore decided to offer second-year students a course in Reviewing the Literature. While well aware that reviewing the literature in their field is ongoing throughout the doctoral process, we believed the timing would be appropriate. This paper recounts the story of the course, from its birth to its evaluation, starting with library research to familiarise ourselves with previous work in this area: handbooks for supervisors and students, as well as published research. We then report on the research we carried
out in our own university; in order to design a course that would match student needs as far as possible, we investigated what supervisors expect of a literature review, what challenges doctoral students face when reviewing literature and what students wanted to see in a course designed to help them tackle this element of their thesis. We present an outline of the course we subsequently designed, before sharing student and tutor feedback. Sample course materials are included in the appendices.
PUBLISHED WORK ON WRITING LITERATURE REVIEWS: HANDBOOKS
We began by consulting handbooks aimed at supervisors and students. Paltridge and Starfield (2007) has a very useful section on reviewing literature, in a chapter entitled ‘Background’; and Kamler and Thomson
