“This is not familiar to most people”: navigating peer reviewers’ comments and knowledge construction practices by PhD students in supervision interactions

1 Introduction

Academic settings have always been, and will continue being, home to high-stakes interactions where speakers need to communicate effectively in a variety of spoken academic genres. Among these speakers are PhD students who are expected to achieve a number of cognitively demanding tasks. So much more is expected from a PhD student however than the completion of their PhD project. Within the time they are given for project completion, they are also expected to engage in socialization to the research community, and join the knowledge construction practices of their research community, thus “[contributing] to the advancement of knowledge in their disciplines” (Delamont et al. 1994). While there may be differences in other geographies, we can safely suggest that this is the general picture for western and most parts of Europe. This process of socialization has been described as a “psychological transition” (Ziman 1993; cited in Larivière 2012: 464) from being in a position where one is instructed on existing knowledge that is known to the research community to a state where one is expected to start contributing with new knowledge, thus joining in the community’s knowledge construction practices. In fact, we can safely suggest that in most cases if not all, arriving at this second stage of practicing knowledge construction is the primary goal of a PhD program (Larivière 2012). In addition, doctoral research is a major source of new knowledge production in universities, and research students are pivotal in establishing international collaborative links (Siddle 1997).

Among the complex practices through which this knowledge construction and the socialization to the research community can take place is publication activities that PhD students engage in.

For PhD students in the western academic culture in many contexts, publication is undoubtedly one of the main ways of the enculturation of a PhD student into the research community, as it is through getting published, or not, that the “knowledge gets validated or rejected by the scientific community” (Larivière 2012: 464), especially in the natural sciences. So if knowledge construction has taken place, it will need to reach the research community through one of the main paths, be it academic publication, conferences or the digital platforms which are becoming increasingly popular especially in natural sciences. Our focus in this paper is placed on writing for publication in international journals only.

Whether in joint co-authored publication, or in papers where they are the sole authors, PhD candidates strive so their work sees daylight and can reach the rest of the research community. In addition to other socialization and enculturation practices such as labwork, seminars and coursework, supervision and other meetings at their departments, they need to learn how to get their research published through prestigious journals. This learning includes, among other things, becoming familiar with the epistemological characteristics of one’s domain, and the conventions and expectations of the research community as well as the local, domestic discourse community of the target journal (see Li [2006] for a discussion of the different discourse communities). The value of a research paper is its contribution to the field through new knowledge, which can only be achieved if one is familiar with these necessary levels of discourse community. This novelty, however, is not understood by being “completely new” or “out of the blue” but by being “carefully tied to and shown to grow out of existing knowledge” (Kaufer and Geisler 1989: 160; as cited in Li 2006). This makes it all the more necessary to be familiar with what is known and not known to the general research community in the relevant domain and the domestic discourse community of the target journal, as mentioned here.

The present paper addresses knowledge construction practices by PhD candidates when they are working on joint publications with their supervisors. More specifically, it focuses on the interactions they have with their supervisors in supervision meetings where they are working on interpreting and navigating peer reviewers’ comments they have received from the journal. Using 11 hours of naturally occurring interactions between PhD students and their supervisors from the natural sciences domain, the paper uses applied conversation analysis as its main method to analyze these interactions, focusing on negotiations between the PhD students’ and their supervisors on knowledge-construction related issues.

By doing so, the paper addresses multiple research gaps. First of all, this paper addresses an under-researched spoken academic genre, namely PhD supervision interactions, where PhD supervisors and students use English as their lingua franca. Equally little is known about PhD students’ efforts to achieve international publication (but see Seidlhofer [2012] on academic striving for international publication). Most research on PhD students’ writing activities have considered the writing process in general and the production of the separate sections in PhD theses (e.g. Hyland 2005; Paltridge et al. 2012; Pecorari 2006; Shaw 1991) as well as students’ and supervisors’ perceptions of the PhD writing process (e.g. Belcher 1994; Bitchener and Basturkmen 2006). In addition, to date, no study to the author’s knowledge has included interactions between PhD students and their supervisors on how the students interpret peer reviewers’ comments when it comes to knowledge-construction related issues. In this sense, the data in the paper is unique, as it provides a window for us to have insights into the actual negotiations between experts and experts-in-the-becoming, taking both the local discourse community of the journal as well as the general scientific community in their domain.

The present paper follows from the author’s three earlier papers on PhD student–PhD supervisor interactions. Unlike the foci in the earlier papers, namely expressing disagreement (Björkman 2015), genre qualities and the architecture of PhD supervision interactions (Björkman 2016), and linguistic competence and content knowledge as neutralizers of institutional and academic power (Björkman 2017), the point of investigation is in the present paper is on knowledge construction as negotiated between PhD students and supervisors.

2 Previous research on PhD students’ writing practices for international publication: perceptions and factors contributing to successful publication

Learning how to produce the critical genres while practicing academic writing is undoubtedly key to the completion of a PhD project. A PhD student does not only engage in data collection, labwork, fieldwork if applicable and learn how to apply a range of methodological procedures to the data; s/he needs to also learn how to report the research in the main genres of a PhD thesis and research articles. While the genre of PhD thesis has attracted considerable attention in the literature, not much is known about what happens when PhD students engage in activities aiming for international publication. Knowledge construction, being the focal point of investigation in the present paper, is mainly achieved through the genre of the research article, and across different domains, new knowledge reaches the scientific community via research articles. Most of the information on different aspects of the production of research articles comes from experienced writers (e.g. Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995; Hyland 2000; but see Swales [2004] Gosden [1995] on PhD students’ knowledge construction in specific disciplines) and not novice scholars or PhD students. We will now turn to what we know about novice scholars’ scientific publication efforts and the factors that seem to be influential in publication activity.

Despite being novice scholars, PhD students’ contribution to knowledge has been described as having “a greater cognitive value” in comparison to senior researchers (Shinn 1988). This was explained by the stakes being higher for PhD students and their consequent precision when doing research. Doctoral research is considered broadly to be one of the main sources of knowledge production by universities (Siddle 1997; in Kamler 2008). However, far from all PhD students succeed in scholarly publication. In a large scale study in the United States, the findings show that while one in every two students achieves some type of publication (e.g. book chapter, conference paper), there is great disciplinary variation when it comes to publishing research articles. Engineering and science students seem to be named as a co-author in at least one journal publication throughout their PhD education, 47% and 44%, respectively. The percentages are quite low in social sciences and humanities (22% and 15%, respectively).

If we turn to what contributes to successful publication by PhD students, we see the role of the supervisor as a key factor (Gemme and Gingras 2008). In a survey looking at PhD students’ research topics, over 90% of the respondents reported supervisor involvement in the selection of the topic of the research project. The percentage of involvement was lower for domains of pure sciences and mathematics; social sciences and humanities were below this percentage (86%, 88%, 92%, respectively), but higher in applied sciences and engineering (95%).

Other than supervisors’ involvement in the choice of topic and their approval of research article topics, the actual critiquing process was experienced as the most critical factor in PhD students’ understanding of the production of a scholarly piece of writing (Caffarella and Barnett 2000). Critiquing was found to be among the main factors helping PhD students understand the process of scholarly writing and helping them produce a high quality piece of scholarly writing. The students who reported this to be the main factor in them gaining increased confidence as novice writers drew special attention to two aspects of critiquing, namely, personalized face-to-face feedback, and ongoing critiques they received on their manuscripts (Caffarella and Barnett 2000).

While receiving feedback both from the supervisor and fellow PhD students seemed to be the most important factor, it was not always associated with positive experiences. PhD students initially experienced anxiety over receiving negative feedback, and the peer feedback they provide for fellow PhD students became much less emotionally charged over time. Over a longer period of time, giving and receiving feedback resulted in “a sense of growth” (Caffarella and Barnett 2000: 48). It is interesting to note that their anxiety about receiving critiques in general (that is, not by their peers) was present long after they were done with the writing activity. Previous research seems to broadly ignore the emotional effects of emotional reactions when receiving feedback, providing only general advice such as that one should refrain from getting defensive (Rudestam and Newton Rae 1992). As we will see in the data in the present paper as well, working with feedback is both a cognitive process where the students need to show good scholarly judgment, as well as being an emotional process, also relevant in a novice scholar’s identity (Excerpt [1] in Section 3) (Caffarella and Barnett 2000: 50).

The positive effect of active supervision when it comes to scholarly writing activity has been covered in several more studies. PhD students who have a mentoring relationship with their supervisors and those who get to co-author papers with their supervisors were significantly more productive than others who had not been in such a collaborative mentoring relationship with their supervisors (Paglis et al. 2006). This shows clearly the effect co-authorship has on students’ scholarly publication activities. In addition, research shows that encouragement from PhD supervisors led to increased publication activity by PhD students. Also influential was support by universities and departments; students who attended departments that had clear policies for increasing publication activity published more.

Also critical in international publishing efforts is undoubtedly the language of publication. Scholars, both novice and experienced, who do not have English as their native language use English predominantly as the working lingua franca in their everyday research activities. While publishing in English may not be problematic for some, it can present serious challenges for others. Scholars from different first language backgrounds are under significant pressure to publish their research in English (Lillis and Curry 2010). Failing to publish in English would have serious consequences for them, such as not being able to contribute to knowledge construction in their fields and not making the impact they would be able to make otherwise (Lillis and Curry 2010; Seidlhofer 2012). As Seidlhofer states, scholars who need to publish in a different language than their own need to take into account several parameters: they need to learn not only how to achieve a sufficiently high level of proficiency in English, they also need to be familiar with the conventions of the relevant written genres, which may differ greatly from the conventions in their own language (Seidlhofer 2012). It is often that research article submissions which do not comply with the expected language standards are returned for major revision if not rejected.

While the present paper will not consider written academic ELF as such, ^[1] we need to keep in mind that the subjects in the study are novice and experienced scholars who all write in a language other than their own, in English, which is the dominant lingua franca in academic publication. In the Findings and Discussion sections here, we will turn to whether publishing in English is topicalized in the interactions as being a relevant factor.

As can be gathered from the studies reviewed above, it is certainly not a given that PhD students publish research articles during their PhDs and upon completion of their degrees, having become novice scholars. Publication success depends on several influential factors, among them, supervisor support through a collaborative mentoring relationship where the supervisor walks the student through the steps of publishing. This brief paper will be an addition to the previous studies on two accounts: (i) with its data on supervisor and students’ discussions, and (ii) with the interactions where we see the supervisors’ collaborative mentoring role in their co-publications with their students.

3 The research context and data

The data in the present paper was collected at the Natural Science faculty of a large Swedish university between 2014 and 2018. The university is highly international with exchange program agreements with 54 countries. There are almost 30,000 students studying at this university, and approximately 1,800 of them are PhD students. This site is an international university where as much as 50%of the students and staff are from non-Swedish backgrounds. In this sense, the site is also a true lingua franca setting where all these individuals rely on English as their most dominant lingua franca. As stated in the author’s previous papers from this setting, Swedish higher education has been one of the most internationalized in continental Europe. Sweden is in third place with over 800 English-taught programs in 2014, following the Netherlands with 1,078, and Germany with 1,030 programs offered in English (Wächter and Maiworm 2014).

A few words are in order on the individuals’ practices in the local language. PhD students acquire some Swedish through living in the country for at least four years until they bring their projects to completion, and supervisors who have achieved tenure learn the local language to varying degrees. Nevertheless, they rely almost entirely on English at their departments. While there are different practices in the Social Science faculty, where some subjects do require a good knowledge of Swedish, in the Natural Science faculty all operations are run in English with the exception of some social talk that would for instance take place by the coffee machine. It is also important to mention that all the PhD students in the study were working on compilation theses. In compilation theses, which are very common in Sweden, especially in natural sciences but increasingly in social sciences and humanities as well, the PhD candidate produces three or four journal articles. While requirements can vary across departments, in most cases, at least two of the articles need to get published and the other two accepted for a PhD project to be completed. A compilation thesis also needs to have an introduction, termed a “kappa,” which needs to show the connection between the articles clearly.

The material used for the present study is made up of only naturally occurring speech, in total 11 hours of recordings. The definition of naturally occurring data here is data that exist regardless of the existence or presence of the researcher. The recordings have been analyzed for the most part by using the CLAN software (MacWhinney 2000), which is a helpful software where the transcript and the recording are tied together, allowing the researcher to stay focused on the actual recordings while being able to focus on the transcript simultaneously. A large part of the data was collected in 2014, with additional recordings in 2017 and 2018. The recordings have been transcribed in their entirety — although without complete notations, totaling around 61,000 words. The knowledge-construction related episodes that are relevant for the present analysis have gone through a second round of transcribing in order to fine-tune the transcripts.

4 Theoretical approach and methodological procedures

The methodology in the paper is applied conversation analysis. As McCabe (2006) states, CA is both a method and a theoretical approach. As will be well-known to many, CA adopts a social constructivist approach which argues that our experiences as human beings are not fixed; rather, they are constantly mediated through language, culture and history (Burr 2003). In a new conceptualization of social constructivism, and as being particularly relevant to the present paper, there is an increased recognition of micro-level processes involved in the construction of knowledge (Gergen 1985). The present paper will provide a look into these micro-level processes as experienced in the interactions between PhD students and supervisors. In this view, knowledge itself is not what is salient; it is rather how knowledge is negotiated, “situated and tied to human experience” (Lester and O’Reilly 2018).

CA has been named as the most appropriate methodology for analyzing naturally occurring interactions, as can also be seen in the increasing number of scholars using CA in their analyses from ELF settings (e.g. Cogo 2009; Deterding 2013; Firth 1996; Kaur 2011). Specifically, the paper will draw on applied conversation analytic procedures (Richards and Seedhouse 2016), including both local patterns of interaction as well as “the tensions between [these] local practices and any ‘larger structures’ in which these are embedded, such as conventional membership categories, institutional rules, instructions, accounting obligations, etc.” (Ten Have 2007: 199). The author has included a discussion of this earlier, in this very journal (Björkman 2017), arguing for the need to adapt mainstream CA procedures to account for interactive data, also referring to previous studies that have shown how this can be done (e.g. Santner-Wolfartsberger 2015; Deterding 2013). These studies carried out with ELF data have advocated for the same approach, namely the need to adapt CA to account for interactive data (Santner-Wolfartsberger 2015; also see Deterding [2013] for an adapted version of CA).

The present study however did not employ pure CA but followed procedures drawing on CA, using conversation analytic approaches. ^[2] As Seedhouse says, CA “normally tries to avoid making (premature) reference to background information such as institutional setting and personal details (age, gender, etc.) until after the initial analysis. This is so that it can be established which particulars are demonstrably relevant to the actors in the interaction, so that these particulars are manifest in some way in the details of the interaction” (Seedhouse 1999: 41, chapter 1). This has been the approach in the present paper. The analyses were first done, followed by anchoring to the speakers’ institutional and academic roles. By doing so, one can first focus on what is going on in the interactions, and then do the linking to the speakers’ roles. It needs to be kept in mind when taking into account the analyses and the findings here that the data here comes from an institutional setting. When working with institutional data, “individual interactional features have to be understood in the interactional (or institutional) environment in which they occur” (Seedhouse 1999: 62).

This brings us to the question whether PhD supervision meetings would qualify as classroom or institutional discourse. Seedhouse tells us that as soon as the “teacher,” in our case the supervisor, gives instructions on the expected outcome, the outcome will be institutional and not natural conversation (Seedhouse 1999: 63). In this sense, the definition of institutional talk in the present paper is in agreement with Lester and O’Reilly (2018), in that institutional talk is talk that takes place in institutional settings but also is about institutional tasks. In the case of the present dataset and context, we have institutional discourse, not free conversation. It is controlled by the expectations of the research community, and in the present dataset, also the local research community as the readers of the target journal. It is very much shaped by the shared assumptions of these two levels of research community about what knowledge is, how it is acquired and what purposes it serves. The core goal of the PhD supervisor–student interactions in the present dataset are to navigate the peer reviewers’ comments for the more overall aim of getting published. Within this process of course, the PhD supervisors most likely consider their own pedagogical goals as supervisors, such as their students’ enculturation into the research community.

5 Findings: navigating peer reviewers’ comments and knowledge construction

In this section, we will be looking at a number of episodes of knowledge construction and meaning practices by two sets of PhD students as expressed in the interactions with their supervisors while they are interpreting the peer reviewers’ comment they have received on a co-authored paper they had earlier submitted to a key journal in their domain. As will be clear from the following excerpts, the speakers’ institutional and academic roles are relevant to the publication and writing activities that they are engaged in, specific to the common goal they have, which is for the paper to see daylight in the journal they are targeting for publication. ^[3]

In Excerpt (1) below, the supervisor starts the meeting by asking the student how he feels about the peer reviewers’ reports, by asking his “overall impression” (line 1). The reviewers are broadly unhappy with the paper and have been very critical in the review, and the supervisor wants to see how the student has perceived the reports.

In line 6, we see that the PhD student thinks one of the reviewers has provided “useful and critical” comments that will help them revise the paper accordingly; however, the student feels the other reviewer, who has recommended rejection of the paper, has concluded that the paper does not contribute to the field with new knowledge on the topic (lines 16–18). The student says clearly that no revision will be able to please the second reviewer, and says “we have no way to fix them and don’t work with this” (line 20). In other words, the reviewer says that knowledge construction has not taken place, and that the paper is not revisable.

As covered in the literature review section, PhD students feel anxiety about the negative critiquing they receive (Rudestam and Newton Rae 1992), and this can be seen in the PhD student’s reaction in Excerpt (1) (line 4). Other than the emotional reaction, the excerpt shows how the supervisor and the student negotiate meaning about the reviewers’ comments. The fact that the student does not hesitate to reject the supervisor’s explanation is noteworthy, and the fact that he disagrees when necessary shows that they adopt the role of co-authors (see also Björkman 2017). In Excerpt (2) below, we see the supervisor and the student continue the discussion where the student tries to convince the supervisors that what the reviewer wants is simply not possible to do in the present paper.

In Excerpt (2) above, the student tries to convince the supervisor that the changes required by the second reviewer cannot be made in this paper, and that it would take another paper to accommodate all the required revisions. The student says the reviewer was very critical (“But he trash our all work he [just he think]” in line 15), and the point the reviewer is critical and requires changes about is “the main important variable” (line 11). In this sense, the student shows good knowledge of the design of the study as well as good interpretation of what the reviewer is saying. This can be observed in the two instances he corrects the supervisor, first rejecting the supervisor’s explanation of what the reviewer is saying, pointing to the main point they are trying to make in the paper (“yeah but that is that not what we want to say we don’t want to say the model are bad we want to the precipitation is important there why we look after the precipitation and we mention in this we said precipitation in the introduction we said precipitation important for agriculture”, lines 6–9). The student shows a better understanding of the micro design of the paper and what the paper wants to convey than the supervisor, while the supervisor seems to be thinking of macro issues and general conventions in the domain (e.g. line 2, “regional model climate model it’s the worst variable to compare to (valid) from this way”). So in line with previous literature (e.g. Shinn 1988), this excerpt shows signals of how strategic the PhD student is, who is prioritizing getting published in the journal. In this sense, we could suggest that the student takes the local discourse community of the target journal into consideration with the main aim to get published, whereas the supervisor tries to explain to the student what the disciplinary community has as their conventions about the issue in discussion.

Below we turn to Excerpt (3), from another PhD student–supervisor pair, the longest of the three selected to be a sample here. The supervisor and the student are talking about the method employed in the paper.

Although this is a joint publication where the supervisor and the student are co-authors, the supervisor is critical towards the method, which she also thinks is one of the reasons, if not the main one, that one of the reviewers is recommending rejection. She goes on to say that this way of working is not what the research community will expect (“that’s usually not very convinced to people”, line 5). We can suggest then that “people”, in this context can only refer to the research community, or alternatively to the local discourse community of the journal. When we see the following turns in the excerpt however, we see more clearly that the supervisor must be referring to the wider disciplinary community. This becomes evident when the student mentions another paper published in the same journal that they have even cited (lines 10 and 11). The supervisor says clearly that she was not aware of this other paper, using the same approach (lines 13–19). Their discussion continues, but the supervisor repeats that using a “single station compared with a grid box” is not an “appropriate way to do that” and that “we all know that problems” (lines 34 and 35). By “we all”, again she refers to the general scientific community. This excerpt shows repeatedly how the student is more strategic, taking into consideration the target journal and how to get published in the journal (thereby focusing on the local conventions of the journal), while the supervisor seems to repeatedly bring up points about the general expectations in the domain and what researchers in their domain would be familiar or unfamiliar with (e.g. “I also tell you that that kind of statistical test it’s not familiar to most of the people that that one you used in your paper”, lines 44–46; “it’s quite not very like it’s not like the t-test everybody knows that”, line 48). While the supervisor does not spell this out in the utterances, it is clear that she refers to general pieces of knowledge in the domain. More support for this comes also from the fact that she seems less familiar than the student on what the journal has previously accepted and published; a few turns later, the PhD student mentions the other paper again that got published in the same journal, using the same method (lines 56 and 63). The supervisor checks her understanding (“They also use the same method”, line 59), which the student confirms in line 63 (“and and it is a paper published in the same journal”). Following this, they together try to understand why the method was found to be acceptable in the other article that got published in the same journal but not in the article they co-wrote (lines 64–70). Overall, we see a similar pattern to the one in Excerpt (2): while the student is focusing on strategic moves to get published in the target journal, the supervisor is focusing on broader issues regarding disciplinary conventions.

6 Discussion and conclusion

This brief paper provides a glimpse into the interactions between PhD supervisors and students when they navigate peer reviewers’ comments. In a previous paper by the author (Björkman 2017), the author considered content knowledge and how good content knowledge tends to neutralize the present academic and institutional power asymmetries. In the present paper, we have seen examples of how the PhD supervisors and students negotiate meaning in the peer reviewers’ reports as co-authors, together. According to Edwards and Westgate, experts will control knowledge by asking the “questions, evaluating and shaping the answers” (Edwards and Westgate 1994: 48). In the present study, we do see the supervisor in this role, partially in that she tries to question the PhD student, while also providing her interpretation of the peer reviewers’ reports. While doing so, we do not see efforts to control knowledge, but it is clear from all three excerpts that the supervisors try to share with the student the general conventions in the scientific community, trying to convince the students to make the right methodological choices for the paper to be revised and then be resubmitted to the journal. Other than this, however, the supervisors and students in the present dataset seem to adopt the roles of equal co-authors, complementing each other with different types of information. While the PhD supervisors try to focus the students’ attention on the conventions and demands of the scientific community, the student seems more strategic, with the immediate aim to get published in the journal. Taking this into consideration, we could suggest with some degree of certainty that the PhD student, aware or not, pays more attention to the local discourse community of the journal.

There seem to be still some noticeable differences in the practices of PhD students and their supervisors in the dataset. This, as discussed above, can be tied to the roles PhD students have as novice scholars who may need to be much more strategic about getting published. For PhD supervisors, especially those who are published and tenured, the stakes are not equally high, whereas for a PhD student, especially for those who are working on compilation theses, ^[6] getting published is critical and plays a key role in the completion of a PhD project. PhD students consider the local discourse community of the target journal and display good knowledge of the subject, unlike PhD supervisors who seem to have more knowledge on the expectations of the general research community in their domain. Another difference can be seen in the emotionally charged reactions the PhD student has upon receiving the reviewers’ reports on their submitted paper.

While it has not been a focus in the present paper, it is worth noting that language is nowhere discussed or topicalized in these interactions. This is interesting considering that there are many difficulties that non-Anglo scholars experience when aiming for international publication (see also Section 2) (Seidlhofer 2012). While achieving international publication is not about the native–non-native dichotomy, it is a fact that a novice writer whose proficiency is not high enough will need to spend a considerable amount of time and effort when preparing his/her manuscripts for submission. It is also the experience of many non-Anglos scholars that their manuscripts get either rejected or turned down because of proficiency-related issues, resulting in them feeling a “lack of recognition of their scholarship” (Seidlhofer 2012: 394) . In the present paper, the supervisors and PhD students were all non-Anglo writers using English as their lingua franca. Nowhere in the interactions of the total of 11 hours is there any mention of language, their formulations, or their proficiency in English. We can suggest that this is because of the language not being an obstacle for the speakers in these interactions. As Turner (2010) states about academic settings, language is mentioned only when it becomes a problem, getting in the way of communication. We can suggest then that the speakers in the present dataset use English as a lingua franca successfully, thus resulting in language not being experienced as an issue. The reviewers’ reports do not seem to include any language-related comments, either (as they are not topicalized in the interactions), and there is no trace of language regulation in the data by either the supervisor or the student (as defined by Hynninen 2016). As covered in Björkman (2017), the supervisor and students use English as their working lingua franca successfully, especially with their levels of proficiency being very similar.

It has not been the intention of the present study to claim generalizability when it comes to all supervision meetings, as also appropriate to the methodological procedures chosen here. The aim has rather been to provide a look into the selected excerpts to zoom in on how supervisors and PhD students identify patterns of meaning negotiation and navigate peer reviewers’ comments when working as co-authors for journal publication. Since co-authorship has been reported as the most influential factor for PhD students in getting published in journals (Caffarella and Barnett 2000), it would be important to carry out more studies on the actual dynamics of interactions between supervisors and their students. The present paper will hopefully spark more interest in the topic, alerting the readers of this journal to this genre where more work is desirable and being done.

Appendix: transcription notations

[

A left square bracket marks the onset of overlap.

]

A right square bracket marks the end of overlapping talk.

wor-

A hyphen marks a cut-off.

…(0.5)

A pause of 0.5 seconds and above

wo:

A colon marks a stretched sound.

°soft°

Speech that is softer than the surrounding talk.

(words)

Used to mark transcriber’s uncertainty of the words produced

>word<

Section spoken faster

↑

Rising intonation

↓

Falling intonation

h.h.h.

Laughter

£word£

Section spoken with a smile voice

CAPS

Section spoken louder

((words))

Author’s comment or elucidation

(xx)

Unsure transcription