Candidacy Examinations and Dissertation Grant Proposals as "Writing Games": Two Case Studies of Chinese-Speaking Doctoral Students' Experiences

With the increase of international graduate students in English-speaking universities, second language writing professionals have called attention to neglected genres in the academic socialization literature. However, most of the studies have been skewed either toward the early or later stage of writing practices, for example, course assignments or theses/dissertations, and not addressed the academic genres of candidacy examinations and dissertation grant proposals. This qualitative dissertation addresses the gap in the literature. Throughout an academic year, I conducted retrospective interviews with 29 students and multiple text-based interviews with 10 case study students from China and Taiwan. Drawing upon Casanave’s (2002) use of the writing games perspective for analysis, this dissertation presents two studies based on the multiple case study approach. The first study explores five students’ writing experiences with candidacy examinations. Findings show that the genre of written candidacy examinations varies across disciplines. Among 17 disciplines examined, five examples existed: (1) literature reviews, (2) assigned questions, (3) a dissertation proposal, (4) a dissertation proposal and questions based on the proposal, and (5) a non-thesis proposal. Despite this stressful situation, the students were able to develop strategies and negotiate their roles to win the candidacy writing games. The second study compares the dissertation grant writing experiences of two doctoral students from two disciplines: biophysics and musicology. The analysis shows that grant writing was like playing writing games, where students had to follow a set of rules and interpret funding agencies’ expectations within the complex genre systems. However, the students developed strategies to play the games through rereading guidelines, rewriting proposals, and networking with senior members of discourse communities. Moreover, the findings reveal that grant writing helped the students to see the big picture of their dissertation projects. This study raises awareness of international graduate students’ dissertation grant writing practices, and it calls attention to discipline-specific grant writing instruction. This project reveals that as the students made transitions from coursework into independent research, they played two kinds of writing games: candidacy examinations and dissertation grant proposals. I highlight the Chinese-speaking students’ challenges and struggles when dealing with the hidden rules involved in doctoral writing in English as a second language. Suggestions are offered for dissertation advisors, administrators, and thesis writing instructors to better help prepare students for independent research and writing.