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French

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10670/1.ddeojl

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The FOU in the doctoral context: specific needs of international and expected students implicit in the French academic world

Abstract

International audience The writing of a doctoral thesis is run by very strict discursive, organizational and methodological norms and uses, even though these norms are seldom explicitly formulated. Learning these uses is an important difficulty for international doctoral students, partly because their literacy is rather different from the written practices of their host university, especially at a rhetoric level. By referring to the analyses conducted in the framework of our own doctoral research, we will focus on a specific disciplinary field in order to answer the question: “What is expected from doctoral students in linguistics about the conducting and writing of their research in France?”To do so, we postulate that it is necessary to take into account the situated nature of any scientific investigation, and thus to break with a universalist conception of knowledge construction. Consequently, research writing cannot be analyzed only in its linguistic or textual dimension. Rather, it could be successfully enlightened by an anthropological point of view, which we will develop through a qualitative and interpretative approach.We will first present our theoretical framework, which is rooted in the fields of academic writing teaching and learning, epistemology and communication anthropology. Then we will show how an ethnografic-based investigation is able to bring to light some hidden codes and uses that govern the writing of a PhD dissertation and circulate within the researchers’ scientific community. For this purpose, we will analyze in this article one of the five text corpora studied in our doctoral research, i.e. extracts of recent doctoral thesis in linguistics that a group of PhD supervisors at Université de Franche-Comté –where our research is grounded- reported us as being particularly brilliant ones. The findings should result in a better understanding of a few essential but invisible expectations, and allow us to propose a few teaching leads in order to overcome some of the writing difficulties these students have to face.

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