Students’ Voices Becoming: Feedback Dialogues in Intercultural Doctoral Supervision

Abstract

In this study I draw on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism to explore feedback dialogues in the context of intercultural doctoral supervision. The participants are six Chinese international doctoral students and their non-Chinese supervisors in a New Zealand research university. Composed of four phases, this mixed-method research offers insights into the intercultural feedback dialogues from perspectives of two research paradigms (postpositivist-oriented pragmatism and constructivist-oriented pragmatism), two disciplines (applied linguistics and doctoral education) and two kinds of dialogues (external and internal). It is a study of feedback, but moves beyond the feedback to the wider context within which feedback is provided and responded to. In phase 1, I investigate the external feedback dialogues from the research paradigm of postpositivist-oriented pragmatism and mostly from the perspectives of applied linguistics. This study commenced with an analysis of supervisors’ written feedback on the first draft of the students’ PhD proposals and the students’ feedback responses as reflected in the second draft. The findings reveal the non-Chinese supervisors’ preferences when providing written feedback in relation to the feedback focus and linguistic formulations, as well as the Chinese international doctoral students’ inclinations when responding to the feedback. In phase 2 I extend the analysis by examining the students’ self-reasoning about their feedback responses through semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest that the students’ preference for feedback provision differs from their supervisors’ feedback practice to some extent. These differences, together with the students’ perceptions of feedback focus and formulations, affect the students’ feedback responses. In phase 3, the research paradigm shifts to constructivist-oriented pragmatism. Within this paradigm, I investigate the internal feedback dialogues, through which the students’ feedback responses come into being. Insights gained through analysing the same interview data as in phase 2 indicate that the students’ feedback responses are the result of a series of complex inner dialogues made by the students. The research focus returns to the external dialogues in phase 4, in which I trace the developmental trajectory of the transformative voices identified in the students’ feedback responses from perspectives of intercultural doctoral supervision. The students were interviewed a second time and the findings show similarities and divergences among the students regarding the development of the transformative voices in their feedback responses. In order to gain an in-depth understanding of how the voices have developed, one of the six students was interviewed a third time to form a longitudinal case study in which I holistically analysed the four-phase data of this student. The findings from that single case study suggest that the supervisors’ personal qualities and cultural recognition, the student’s progressive academic expertise, as well as role modelling of peers, all play a part in facilitating the student’s assimilation of alien voices, while renovating her culturally enrooted voice. All these findings lead to a conclusion that feedback works through dialogical relationships among the feedback providers, the recipients and possible others: all the involved speaking subjects communicate the information of students’ learning gaps and strategies to fill the gaps through feedback dialogues; more importantly, through feedback dialogues they negotiate their cultural embedded ideologies and perceptions of the ‘gaps’ and ‘strategies’, of being ‘students’ and ‘supervisors’, and their epistemologies of knowledge construction.