Reviewing the literature


Boote and Beile’s criteria reveal slightly different priorities from those of our supervisors, none of whom, interestingly, mentioned the discussion of methodology, considered by Boote and Beile as a crucial LR component in educational research. Kwan (2006), in a genre analysis of LRs, refers to a useful typology of possible thesis formats, with potential implications for locating and structuring LRs, which features in our unit on organisation and structure: ILrMRD: (Introduction – Literature review – Methodology – Results – Discussion). Kwan terms this the ‘traditional’ format (though this may reflect her Applied Linguistics perspective and may not be so regarded in fields where research is non-empirical – see below).


Article compilation: ‘an anthology of individual publishable research papers’ (ibid., p. 31). Here, the works included in the portfolio would each separately review the literature relevant to the specific research. Topic-based: ‘[a thesis] that begins with a chapter that is headed ‘Introduction’ and ends with a chapter headed ‘Conclusion’. The chapters in-between are headed according to the topics and sub-topics of the writer’s investigation’ (ibid.). We use an Education thesis to exemplify this; it follows this pattern because it takes the form of a theoretical, a priori argument, rather than reporting and discussing empirical findings.


Kwan found that chapters devoted to reviewing literature (often more than one in a thesis) often conformed to an overall Introduction – Body – Conclusion structure; Ridley (2012) makes a similar point. As we


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point out in our Organisation and Structure unit, this structure is also frequently employed in sections within chapters. However, she also notes that ‘not all theses contain a recognizable literature review’ (Kwan, 2006, p. 35), and this was confirmed by our own research (see below). As Kwan points out, the pedagogical literature on thesis writing often conflates ‘Introduction’ and ‘Literature Review’, and indeed she found similar rhetorical patterns in LR chapters to those in Bunton’s (2002) revised ‘Create a Research Space’ (CARS) model for thesis introductions (based on Swales, 1990), though employing some different strategies.


The analysis of academic genres by rhetorical moves is of course a central pedagogical tool in EAP. In view of the brevity of our current course, we presented only a paraphrase of three of Swales’ CARS ‘step’ descriptors for Move 2 ‘Establishing a niche’ (Swales, 1990, p. 141) which were evidenced in our own samples: • Indicating a gap in existing research


• Raising new questions • Continuing and building on a tradition


A longer course might very usefully exploit the level of detail offered in Kwan’s analysis (Appendix 1).


One further article that informed our materials was Cisco (2014), which offers a particularly vivid visual representation of the process of theme creation in synthesising research findings, with each theme symbolically represented as a separate bucket, where the relevant sources can be placed:


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