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.
