Digital provisions for undergraduate proposal writing : securing conceptual alignment between writer and supervisor when using Thesis Writer

Several new digital tools are devoted to supporting thesis writers. Whilst doctoral thesis writing is a well-studied issue, much less is known about thesis writing within shorter Continental European 3-year undergraduate programmes. To equally study and support thesis writing, we created Thesis Writer (TW), a bilingual (English/German) genre-sensitive tool that offers dissertation writers a word processor with additional support at the conceptual, rhetorical, structural, and organisational level, as well as collaborative writing and feedback functionality. The aim of this presentation is to provide both illustrative data and a synthesis of TW’s affordances in structuring student/supervisor interaction when setting up the first thesis project. One practical concern of high significance is the reaction of supervisors to the tool, as it is essential that supervisors not only accept the tool and its philosophy, but that they actively integrate it into their supervision practices. Preliminary observations have shown that they are creative in cultivating their own ways of using TW when developing a thesis structure. In a case study of ten students at a Swiss University, we observed writer-supervisor interactions during their initial and first follow-up BA thesis meetings, each lasting 60-90 minutes. The meetings were conducted and recorded virtually, to determine how they came to an agreement about the topic, and how they ensured that they both understood it in the same way. This kind of “conceptual alignment” involves negotiated intentions and expectations on both sides when creating a basic proposal structure supported by TW. In adjacent qualitative interviews, students and supervisors were asked about their experiences with this procedure and about their reactions to TW. The results show a broad range of interaction patterns and considerable divergence in the way TW is used