STUDENT WEAKNESSES AND SUPERVISOR COMMENTS ON FINAL YEAR PROJECT DRAFTS ON NEWSPAPER FRAMING OF FLOODS

Abstract

University students take academic writing courses, but they may not adequately prepare them for research writing in their final year project because the genre conventions are largely unfamiliar to students. The study examined the changes made in drafts of a final year project on newspaper framing of floods in response to supervisor feedback. The specific aspects examined are: (1) weaknesses in the content of drafts, and (2) the focal point of the supervisor’s feedback. The case study involved the analysis of 11 drafts of a final year project report written by a student in a Malaysian public university. Coding was done at the comment level based on an analysis framework. The results indicate that the main weakness of the student was writing the research problem, which required four drafts and repeated rewriting. The easiest sections were data collection procedures and limitations, and did not need rewriting. The participant description section required only one round of comments. The analysis revealed that the weaknesses were largely due to a lack of synthesis of the literature read and unfamiliarity with the expected content of the various sections of a thesis. The longitudinal analysis revealed that the student sometimes exhibited a delayed response to comments, and the supervisor had to progress from giving referential feedback to rewriting parts of the writing, giving more specific comments, and even using sentence completion to get the student to produce acceptable content in the final year project report. A majority of the comments were on content (69.6% of 125 comments), and the information provided was often inadequate and repetitive. Relatively fewer comments were on organisation (17.6%) and language (12.8%). The study suggests that supervisors need to closely guide the students to conceptualise the research problem, and experiment with various feedback strategies to tailor feedback type to student writing.