Exploring Graduate Students’ Challenges in Dissertation Writing

Abstract

This doctoral research attempts to explore the rhetorical-structure and content-related challenges experienced by graduate students, from Blida 2 University, in writing the Master’s dissertation, along with the contributing factors to those challenges. To this end, an exploratory concurrent-nested design was adopted using various investigative methods namely: questionnaires, semi-structured follow-up interviews, and an additional in-depth document analysis of Master’s dissertations. The research findings revealed three common challenges mainly: content-related challenges, summarizing and paraphrasing issues, and language proficiency and writing issues. These challenges, according to the data gathered, were attributed to three factors which are: lack of practice in academic writing classes, lack of supervisor’s guidance, and absence of a common assessment framework.