Abstract:

Graduate students are expected to publish academic papers in English to earn their degrees, to establish academic careers, and to contribute to their field of research. As academic writing of scholarly texts requires using specific language features, discourse practices, communicative skills of target academic groups, as well as students’ subject-matter knowledge and expertise, writing research reports at the doctoral level belongs to a specialist, theory- and research- informed branch of English language and literacy education. Therefore, acquiring the ability to construct knowledge in disciplinary-oriented ways at an internationally accepted level can be challenging for doctoral students who come from non-English speaking backgrounds . This study examines how non-native speakers of English assessed their own content knowledge of and abilities in research methods while they were earning their credits and writing their dissertation in English. We aimed to find out:(1) how students assessed their research abilities and their knowledge about their academic field at the beginning, (2) at the current point of their PhD studies, and (3) if there were significant differences between male and female students and across the four years in their studies. The current study is part of a larger research project. A questionnaire focused on students’ specific knowledge and skills concerning:(1) their own research topic, (2) research design and methodology, (3) finding and analyzing the special literature, (4) designing research instruments, (5) formulating research questions, (6) analyzing data, (7) ability to write publishable papers and their dissertation in appropriate academic English. Participants were 254 doctoral students from 49 different countries, using 52 languages in addition to English, studying at 14 Hungarian universities; 124 were female and 127 were male students. The survey was conducted online in the spring of 2022. Students indicated on a 1 to 6 Likert scale their knowledge and abilities at the start of the PhD program and at the current point of their studies. At the start of the program, from among the seven components, the students agreed with the statement that they had a good knowledge of their own research area (M=4.09, SD= 1.36) and they agreed to a less degree (M=3.67, SD=1.50) with the statement that they knew how to write a publishable paper in English. At the current point of their studies, participants agreed to a larger degree (M=4.90, SD=0.93) that they had a good knowledge of finding and analyzing the special literature; they were a little less certain about their ability to analyze data (M=4.65, SD=1.13). An independent- samples t-test found significantly higher scores for male participants both at the start and at the current point of their studies on all seven components, indicating that they were more confident about their abilities. The descriptive statistics showed progress over the years; paired t-tests also confirmed significant differences (p<.05). To see if there were any differences among the students in the four years regarding their perceived difficulty levels of the items, one-way ANOVA test was conducted and no significant differences (p>.05) were found among their perceptions.

Keywords:

Self-assessments, doctoral students, research methods, research abilities, research knowledge, academic writing.