خلاصة:
The present study aimed at providing a typology of Iranian supervisors’ written feedback on L2 graduate students’ theses/dissertations and examining the way different speech functions are employed to put the supervisors’ thoughts and feelings into words. In so doing, a corpus of comments, including 15,198 comments provided on 87 TEFL theses and dissertations by 30 supervisors were analyzed. We employed an inductive category formation procedure to form the typology of comments, and followed a deductive procedure to put the comments into the three categories of expressive, referential, and directive speech functions. The findings showed that supervisors provided seven main categories of comments on theses and dissertations: grammar and sentence structure, content, method, organization, references, formatting, and academic procedures. Furthermore, the findings indicated that supervisors employed comments with different patterns and for different purposes on MA and PhD students’ texts.
ملخص الجهاز:
The findings showed that supervisors provided seven main categories of comments on theses and dissertations: grammar and sentence structure, content, method, organization, references, formatting, and academic procedures.
To examine the quality of supervisor feedback, a functional perspective of grammar, which attempts to show how people get things done by the use of different {مراجعه شود به فایل جدول الحاقی} resources at their disposal, such as language and other semiotic means (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), was employed.
In the present study, employing the three language functions (expressive, referential, and directive) identified by Kumar and Stracke (2007) as the main language functions in supervisor feedback exchanges, the supervisors‟ comments on L2 MA and PhD students‟ texts were investigated.
48 A Typology of Supervisor Written Feedback on L2 Students’ Theses… Kumar and Stracke (2007), also, provided a classification of comments on a PhD dissertation based on speech functions.
72, p 62 A Typology of Supervisor Written Feedback on L2 Students’ Theses… gave more data analysis comments on dissertations than theses, and there was no significant difference between the frequencies of research design comments.
Supervisors benefited from {مراجعه شود به فایل جدول الحاقی} these comments as new windows to open dialogues with their doctoral students, and attempted to challenge them with more profound tasks, usually requiring more powerful argumentation, deeper reflection, synthesis of propositions, or further empirical and/or library research, which are directly in line with the objectives of critical thinking approach to supervision (Lee & Murray, 2015).