Danish PhD students need help writing in English
CULtivate 04th , 2013 — On Supervision
These are the findings of a research project which Associate Professor Gitte Wichmann-Hansen from the Centre for Teaching and Learning has done together with three colleagues from the Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media at Arts.
The project ensues from the increasing internationalisation which is taking place, and which means that all researchers – PhD students included – have to publish in international journals.
“For many PhD students, having to write in English makes them feel unsure of themselves and hence not up to the task,”
Gitte Wichmann-Hansen, Associate Professor.
It is generally assumed that Danish PhD students are simply proficient enough in English. That it’s not something the university has to worry about. But in fact we know very little about whether Danish PhD students feel sufficiently comfortable about this, says Gitte Wichmann-Hansen.
Together with her colleagues she therefore conducted a quantitative questionnaire-based survey among all 274 PhD students enrolled at Arts in 2012, and which was followed up with qualitative data from 21 PhD students, also from Arts.
Language often decided without involving supervisor
The survey showed that as many as 57 per cent of the PhD students who completed the questionnaire had decided to write their dissertations in English. Two out of three of these students feel that they are proficient or highly proficient in English, even though many of them are not that experienced at writing English and have not done a course in writing academic English.
Often the supervisor has not played any special role in choosing English as the language for the dissertation. Fifty-four per cent of the PhD students stated that their supervisors had not read anything they had written in English before they made their decision. And 25 per cent of the students had neither discussed their choice with their supervisor nor had an English text read by their supervisor before deciding which language to write in.
Students feel unsure of themselves and inadequate
Forty-two per cent of the students – i.e. almost half – also expressed concerns about writing English. What exactly it is that worries them was revealed in the qualitative part of the research project, where 21 PhD students were asked to reflect on their experiences of writing English.
“For many PhD students, having to write in English makes them feel unsure of themselves and hence not up to the task,” explains Gitte Wichmann-Hansen.
Writing a PhD dissertation in English is like driving along a pitted road or knitting a sweater without knowing whether you have enough wool, according to some PhD students at Aarhus University.
The PhD students have many analogous images in their minds of how it felt. They use analogies such as “walking around without glasses”, “being married to someone you don’t know particularly well”, “cycling along a pedestrian street” or “driving without a GPS”.
Specifically, the PhD students feel that they are not sufficiently experienced at writing in English, that they have problems with both vocabulary and grammar, and that they just don’t feel comfortable writing English and have trouble finding their own voice.
“If my writing style and identity are slightly weak in Danish, then they’re non-existent in English, as all my energy goes into trying to write English which is correct and which other people will be able to understand,” says one of the PhD students in the survey.
University should address problem
The interviews also showed that the problems which a PhD student has writing English are perceived as personal problems, and problems which it is up to the individual student to solve.
Just as your choice of writing language is rarely discussed as part of the supervision, nor is support for writing English as a foreign language. Only to a very limited extent does the university offer language courses at an early stage of the PhD programme, and at the moment it is not legitimate to look at PhD students as people who are in the process of learning a new language, says Gitte Wichmann-Hansen.
Based on the survey, she recommends that the university try to improve how it describes what is required and expected of PhD students in terms of their language skills, and that PhD supervisors be better equipped to help their students.
“For example, courses may be offered for PhD supervisors which focus on how, as a supervisor, you can legitimately talk about these issues and address them. The courses can also help to strengthen the supervisors’ competencies at providing constructive feedback on the students’ texts, thereby helping the students to write even better academic English,” says Gitte Wichmann-Hansen.
Supervisors can get inspiration to give PhD students feedback on their writing processes and other support by participating in CUL’s course on supervion.
Watch Gitte Wichmann-Hansen tell more about the project (danish)
