Dr. Nasreen Hussain
Institute of Business Management, Pakistan
The quality of higher education plays a pivotal role in the improvement of national economy and human growth. Ever since Higher Education Commission (HEC) was established, foreign money has been pouring in Pakistan to give a boost to higher education and increase the number of PhDs. Concentrated efforts are being put in by HEC to encourage quality research by facilitating universities to increase the number of PhD candidates. The aim of this study was to evaluate PhD theses in education available on official HEC repository website and to find out the academic writing and organizational skills used by the candidates. Eight PhD theses were randomly selected for this purpose from the four provinces of Pakistan. Qualitative research was opted using document analysis to give voice and meaning to the academic work. Create a-Research-Space (CARS) framework developed by Swales (1990) was used as the basis of data analysis. Introduction chapters were examined in relation to the thesis as a whole to study the moves and steps used by the students, which included establishing a research territory, establishing a niche and occupying the niche. Two main academic writing features: tenses and discourse markers were also considered to explore the quality injected in the first chapter. Findings indicate that the moves, steps and the use of language features were quite limited; therefore, affecting the quality of academic writing, the impact on the production of thesis and consequently lowering the value of the research. The findings will be helpful for the supervisors as well as the research students to use appropriate moves during the supervision process and engage in foreign language writing over a lengthy period of time.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Fourth Annual International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.TLLL.IR), 1-2 February 2020, Ahwaz.
