Supervision as a bridging activity – How can supervision help bridge the transition from writing as a student to writing as a researcher?

How supervisors’ responses facilitate MA-students’ thesis writing. This study aims to contribute with empirical knowledge about what happens in supervision on master theses and how students learn to write field specific through this activity. In this presentation I ask: In what ways does the supervisor respond to the MA- student’s text drafts and oral contributions and how does this support the student’s learning process? I define supervision as an extended communicative activity (Linell, 2009), with several means of interaction intertwined with each other: conversations, emails, text drafts and written feedback. Therefore, a wide range of data is collected over the last 6 months of supervision between two supervision pairs at a Norwegian teacher education, including video recordings of all meetings. The data is analyzed as a whole interaction (not separating talk from text), and a Bakhtinian (1986) view on utterances is used to study how the supervisor acts in conversations and in written feedback in response to the student’s contributions in text drafts and conversations. This analysis reveals twelve different ways the supervisor responds, which I will discuss. Using a social perspective on learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991) I argue that the responses I have called cultural guiding, text instruction and backing are especially important to facilitate the socialization of the students into a new community, teaching them to write in a field specific way and encouraging them to contribute with knowledge in their field (Lea, 2016). Supervision is therefore argued to be a bridging activity, helping the students navigate from participating (i.e., write) as a student to participating more as a researcher.