Effective teacher-student collaborations in writing consultation: Useful strategies informed by reflections from a PhD student

Research productivity has become a crucial requirement of PhD programmes worldwide; however, writing research papers has been a challenge for PhD students (Bitchener & Basturkmen, 2006; Lin & Morrison, 2021). To overcome the challenge, novice writers resort to different resources, including writing teachers. Individual consultations with writing teachers have been investigated through teacher’s self-reflection (Chatterjee Padmanabhan & Rossetto, 2017; Pinder, 2005) and student-teacher discourses (Woodward-Kron, 2007; Woodward-Kron & Jamieson, 2007). While revealing valuable insights into the effectiveness of consultations, a few studies have looked at the active role of PhD students (Ma, 2019; O’Mahony et al., 2013). Students’ views were often elicited retrospectively. The longitudinal perceptual change and writing skill development enabled by multi-session consultations, which can be better monitored via periodic interviews or self- reflections (Negretti, 2012; Yang, 2023), have not been examined.

To fill this research gap, this study examined the reflections written by a physics doctoral student during and after five two-hour consultation sessions. Observations from reflections were triangulated with the manuscript modifications made collaboratively over the consultations. The analysis captures the student’s developmental trajectory and reveals the effectiveness of consultations in complementation to other supports he had received. The student demonstrated in the reflections a rectified understanding of scientific writing purposes; increased awareness of reader-writer relations, rhetorical functions, and move structures in research writing; and improved sensitivity to coherence and skills of coherent writing.

The manuscript analysis shows that most revisions were made at the discourse level (e.g., reorganising information chunks) rather than at the micro level (e.g., lexico- grammatical features). The active engagement of and frequent feedback from the student during the process also helped the teacher adjust the consultation foci and strategies. Altogether, these findings point to the value of actively engaging research students in writing support, providing implications for similar forms of consultations for university students at different levels.