Creating dialogic spaces: “Collaboration” of a language instructor and GenAI in doctoral writing instruction

Abstract

<p>Mastering scholarly writing is a high-stakes and complex task for doctoral students, encapsulated by the imperative “publish or perish/ no degree”. Despite this critical need, research on writing instruction at the graduate level remains limited. This gap is even more pressing in an era of socio-technical changes, where GenAI tools such as ChatGPT show great potential not only in facilitating the scholarly writing process but also in mediating writing courses. Building on the concepts of dialogic spaces in education (Wegerif, 2013; Wegerif & Major, 2023) and writing as a relational process (Murray, 2015), this study suggests that viewing learning as dialogic relations may help redesign doctoral writing instruction with technology. It explores how a language teacher can integrate and collaborate with GenAI tools to open, widen, and deepen dialogic spaces where doctoral students and the instructor share meanings and ideas and construct knowledge of scholarly writing in a course at an English-medium research-intensive university in Hong Kong. This research employs a case study approach to investigate interactions between an English for Research and Publication Purposes (ERPP) instructor and a cohort of education doctoral students in a blended AI-integrated instructional setting. Data collected include video and audio recordings and observational field notes of the focal teaching sessions, retrospective interviews with the instructor, post-course interviews with the students, course documents, and relevant online log data from the students. These data help to understand how the writing specialist approaches the affordances of dialogic spaces with GenAI tools to enhance the students’ learning experiences. By investigating real-time GenAI-integrated doctoral writing instruction through the lens of dialogism, the study aims to bring innovative pedagogies into doctoral writing education. The findings are expected to contribute to developing more interactive, engaging, and effective writing courses that better support doctoral students in adapting to the research community.</p>