“I have shaped my own path to follow”: Scaffolding graduate students from legitimate peripheral participant towards the center

• In Event: Navigating global, national and local education policies and practices

Proposal

Introduction
Graduate writing has gained increasing attention, yet developing an academic or scholarly identity (Matsuda, 2015; Morton & Storch, 2019), authorial or disciplinary identity (Hyland, 2012), and a writer identity (Ivanič, 1998) remains elusive and daunting for students. Such identities are complex, with graduate students often facing thesis writing as a struggle "against enormous odds" (Guerin, 2016, p. 3). They also frequently struggle to find their "voice in the Bakhtinian sense" while navigating the research and dissertation process, which requires "expressions of the writer’s own views, authoritativeness, and authorial presence" (Ivanič & Camps, 2001, pp. 36-37). While the traditional one-to one supervisory model may impart how to do research and provide access to theoretical knowledge, it often falls short of developing students’ identity and voice as emerging scholars (Bedeker & Kerimkulova, 2024; Badenhorst & Guerin, 2016) because most supervisors assume they must only take responsibility for students’ research projects (Hajar & Mhamed, 2021; Lee, 2012). We argue that master-level supervision should go beyond research as a product or process to complete a thesis.
The purpose of this presentation is to show how action research (AR), in conjunction with English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), facilitated the scaffolding of research discourse and the production of scholarly knowledge. We illustrate how four scaffolded tasks functioned as a “pedagogy of supervision” (Fataar, 2014, p. 111), inducting our students into the communities of practices (CoP) of expert scholars (Lave & Wenger, 1991), enabling them to view their identities as flexible, always in the process of being and becoming scholars (Attia & Edge, 2017). We pose the following research question: How did a scaffolded ESP/SFL informed action research project contribute to graduate students' scholarly identities?
Conceptual Framework
We have drawn on the English for Specific Purpose (ESP), which conceptualizes genre as “a class of communicative events” and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) frameworks, as both are based on a functional approach to language, which illustrate how scholarly knowledge is structured, formulated, and encoded through language (Halliday, 1978; Swales, 2004). In this way, both were helpful in our task design to scaffold students’ access and engagement with specialized disciplinary or research registers (Schleppegrell, 2013). In addition, Tardy (2009) provides a valuable framework for our task design by highlighting four key elements: 1) formal knowledge related to lexical grammar and genre structure, 2) rhetorical knowledge related to purpose, authorial stance, and audience, 3) process knowledge related to procedures and disciplinary discourse, and 4) subject-matter knowledge focusing on disciplinary content. These four facets of genre knowledge can be flexible, integrated, and overlapping to be contextually relevant.
Research Methods
The study employed qualitative action research design because it offers a systematic process for planning, observing, and reflecting on our supervision practice (Bolton, 2010). It prompted us to evaluate our supervisory practices critically, particularly in how we could support our supervisees’ topic selection, proposal design, genre understanding, and literature reviews (Yang et al., 2022).
A research-intensive and well-resourced university in Kazakhstan was selected as a research site. Six Kazakh—and Russian-speaking graduate students in a multilingual education program from the 2021-2023 cohort were selected using convenience sampling. Ethical considerations ensured that participants' confidentiality and anonymity were protected by informing them of the study’s purpose, guaranteeing that their data would be used only for research, and safeguarding their identity.
Action research consisted of four cycles.
In Cycle 1, we identified a gap in thesis supervision. Due to inadequate preparation, students often produce incoherent, patchwork writing.
In Cycle 2 (Intervention), we revamped our supervision approach by designing four scaffolded tasks to enhance students' understanding of how language encodes scientific discourse. These tasks built on each other and included purpose, writing frames, and guiding questions to model scholarly thinking.
In Cycle 3 (Analysis), we evaluated the impact of these genre-informed tasks using data from students’ responses to three tasks, 18 reflections, and draft proposals. This helped us assess how well the tasks, sequencing, and guidance facilitated students’ engagement with research discourses.
In Cycle 4 (Reflection), we analysed the summer tasks, and the genre knowledge gained by students. Thematic analysis revealed patterns in students' perceptions, task engagement, and contributions to scholarly work.
Findings and Analysis
Our study revealed a third or in-between space where new meanings, ideas, and identities emerged through interactions with scholarly values (Bedeker et al., 2023). In this space, students navigated their identities, developing a sense of competence and expertise as they transitioned from peripheral participation to fully thinking, becoming, and being scholars (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Thus, the scaffolded tasks significantly deepened students’ theoretical and critical thinking, moving them beyond surface-level understanding and facilitating their socialization into research epistemology. They also helped students transition from peripheral participation to active membership in the academic community, where they exceeded conventional research expectations. Consequently, our tasks provided a crucial bridge, enabling students to access and engage with the academic discourse (Hyland, 2002) and led to a transformative experience, altering our perceptions of students’ scholarly abilities and supervision practices (Meyer & Land, 2006, p. 3).
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Conclusion and Implications
Our genre-based AR fostered a collaborative space, allowing us to rethink supervision as both pedagogy and research. It enabled students to engage deeply with their learning and, through increased sense-making and scholarly discourse, facilitated their self-perception as knowledge producers. We conclude that the ESP/SFL AR design clarified how scholarly knowledge is formulated, helping students recognize that becoming a researcher is both socially mediated and a form of inner growth.

Authors

• Michelle Bedeker, Nazarbayev University

• Sulushash I. Kerimkulova, Nazarbayev University