EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS IN THESIS PROPOSAL WRITING: CHINESE DOCTORAL STUDENTS’ INTERCULTURAL EXPERIENCES
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Authors: Linda Qian Yu
Keywords: higher education, writing emotion, doctoral pedagogy, qualitative approach
Abstract: Doctoral students’ writing emotions can have profound effects on their thesis-writing journey and academic achievement. Despite increasing attention to the affective domain of doctoral writing, little research has been conducted to investigate the writing emotions of Asian international doctoral students, particularly how emotional triggers are impacted by the writing of a thesis proposal. The proposal is the first substantial piece of academic writing for most doctoral candidates. It often poses a great challenge, especially for those studying in an English-speaking country for the first time, and is further implicated by students’ intercultural experiences. This exploratory study seeks to fill a gap in the literature, focusing on Chinese doctoral students from non-English speaking backgrounds studying at a large New Zealand research-based university. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the relationships between students’ intercultural experiences and their writing emotions during the first year of doctoral candidature. By using a sequential mixed methods approach, I initially investigated students’ emotions associated with proposal writing through an online survey (n=73 responses), followed by semi-structured interviews in the second phase (not shown in this paper). Informed by appraisal theory, both positive and negative dimensions of emotions were identified through descriptive statistical analysis. Next, I investigated survey respondents’ reported emotions in each dimension (positive and negative) to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of emotional triggers and appraisals that lead to the elicited writing emotions. The results of this study will have practical implications for improving intercultural doctoral supervision pedagogy.