Using Corpus-based Research Approach to Develop Thesis Supervision Skills

Sonthida Keyuravong, KMUTT

What are the problems with the methods?

1. Transcription is incomprehensible on its own as can be seen below.

“Yes, but you were doing it after everything is being done, after you’ve written the whole thing which is…perhaps we don’t have any argument….. If you look at…if you start with it…if I was writing this as an argument, I would do something like…definitions of research,… problematic… therefore… look at… I don’t know what character means? Characteristics?... Characteristics… more useful,… but… if you write it like this and it becomes an argument rather than just problem of understanding…understanding the reason for the character, you can link why you’re looking,…you’re giving why as well as what.”

This is because the supervision relies on the written work of the students, notes in the students’ written work and sometime information from the internet. The transcription does not cover these parts, making it impossible to understand everything.

2. The using of N-gram function of the AntConc may not be helpful. I am using a cluster of 3 and 4 words, hoping to see some useful language phrases that can show ‘techniques’ used in the supervision. See examples below.

What did I find out?

A corpus analysis might show how language is used to perform various functions of the language, but may not shed light on the ‘techniques used in the supervision’.

Figure 2: Your caption to go here

What’s next?

For this a more qualitative approach is likely to provide more insights. The plan is to use supervision recording together with other support documents including the written work of the students, my co-supervisor’s comments, and other information.

Why do I need to develop my supervision skills?

1. School of Liberal Arts (SoLA) offers PhD program in Applied Linguistics in 2007 after running MA program in ELT for about 30 years. There is a need to develop teachers to be more critical for supervision at PhD level.

2. Even with 10 years of experience in supervision at an MA level, I am mostly

deductive in style and need to develop myself to be more critical.

What would I like to find out?1. Techniques used in the supervision, deductive or inductive, and how they are used

2. Stages (e.g. forming ideas, developing argument, justifying instruments, etc.) each technique is used.How will I go about finding it out?

Research paradigm: Quantitative approach

Subject: My co-supervisor with about 15 years of experience in teaching, supervising and conducting research. (The system at SoLA

allows teachers to develop supervision skills by pairing less experienced

supervisors with more experienced ones.)

Methodology: Corpus-based analysis using N-grams function of AntCon concordancing program to derive patterns of language that shows techniques of supervision

Why corpus-based approach?

1. Lots of data to analyse manually (1 supervision session = 10 pages of

transcription). Analysing data using computer can be helpful.

2. AntCon has a function called N-gram that can look for word clusters which may be able to reveal patterns of language that

shows techniques used in the supervision.

Figure 2: 4-word N-grams

Figure 1: 3-word N-grams