The Future of Education

The purpose of this study is to explore supervisors’ effective practices of providing feedback to their English as Foreign Language (EFL) doctoral students to facilitate students’ development as researchers and scholars during their co-authorship activities for publication. This study further provides information regarding students’ needs and challenges they frequently face during academic writing, co-authorship, and publishing as perceived by supervisors and students.

The study utilized Qualitative Research Design. The main data sources were interviews with supervisors and doctoral students. Their co-authored articles and editorial review letters constituted the supportive data for this research. Purposeful sampling method was used for participant selection. Fifty supervisors in social science programs in Turkey who co-authored the highest number of English SSCI indexed articles with their students within five years were identified. Based on the number of times their co-authored articles were cited, these supervisors and their doctoral students were invited for semi-structured interviews.

Pilot interviews were conducted with five supervisors and students. Preliminary results from this ongoing research showed that the perceived academic writing problems of EFL students and the focus of feedback provided for these problems are very similar among supervisors who frequently co-authored with their doctoral students. A special emphasis was given to the function of feedback to increase motivation, determination, and self-confidence of doctoral students to publish in international journals.