How to Write a Thesis

How to Write a Thesis provides a down-to-earth guide to help students shape their theses. It offers valuable advice as well as practical tips and techniques, incorporating useful boxed summaries and checklists to help students stay on track or regain their way.

The book is the culmination of many years of work with postgraduates and academics and covers all aspects of the research, writing and editing involved in the process of successfully completing a thesis.

In this book, the author moves beyond the basics of thesis writing, introducing practical writing techniques such as free writing, generative writing and binge writing. This edition now deals with the range of different doctorates on offer and integrates more examples of thesis writing. Building on the success of the evidence-based approach used in the first edition, there is also new coverage of Masters theses and undergraduate research projects, along with outlines of useful generic structures for social science and humanities projects.

How to Write a Thesis is the most grounded guide available to students on the practicalities surrounding thesis writing and should be recommended reading for, and by, all supervisors.

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Appraising Research in Second Language Learning

This book is written to guide student and novice researchers through their critical reading of a research paper in the field of second language learning. They will be shown ways of approaching the appraisal of the abstract and the introductory section of the study, both of which set the stage by describing the rationale as well as the objective of the work. Similarly, the reader will be given ideas about how to assess the method and procedures section so that he or she can decide, for example, whether the research design was appropriate, and what precautions were taken to guard against threats of validity to the findings. They will become more familiar with, and confident about, interpreting results from commonly-used descriptive or inferential statistical procedures and checking how appropriately these have been presented. Finally, the reader should be in a position critically to evaluate the researcher’s own interpretation of the findings in terms of the extent to which the conclusion is justified, can be generalized, and has limitations.

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Questionnaires in Second Language Research

One of the most common methods of data collection in second language

(L2) research is to use questionnaires of various kinds. The popularity of questionnaires is due to the fact that they are easy to construct, extremely versatile, and uniquely capable of gathering a large amount of information quickly in a form that is readily processable. In spite of the wide application of questionnaires in the L2 field, there does not seem to be sufficient awareness in the profession about the theory of questionnaire design and processing. Although questionnaire design, and more generally, survey research, has a substantial literature in the social sciences, this has not been sufficiently reflected in L2 methodology texts. The structure of the book is straightforward. After an initial chapter that discusses the nature, the merits, and the shortcomings of questionnaires, separate chapters cover the construction and the administration of the questionnaire, as well as the processing of questionnaire data. The book is concluded by a detailed checklist that summarizes the main principles and recommendations.

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