Writing the Literature Review: Analyzing Texts and Exploring the Context

Abstract

While analysing in-text citations, verbs, and metadiscourse, this study explored supervisors’
perspectives on the writing of literature reviews by Arab doctoral students. The study involved
investigating purposefully 20 literature reviews in two disciplines, namely Applied Linguistics (AL) and
Information Technology (IT) and interviewing five supervisors. Systemic Functional Linguistics was
utilized in analyzing the in-text citations, whereas individual interviews were conducted to retrieve the
supervisors’ perceptions on students’ academic writing. The textual analysis was achieved manually using
tables, whereas mind mapping, a hand analysis, and visual mappings were utilized in analyzing the
interviews. The findings revealed the dominance of integral citations, finite modal operators, and material
verbs ‘processes’. Based on the interviews, Arab doctoral students’ writing was characterized by lacking
the depth of reading and insufficient information on using citations, L2 writing difficulties, and
positioning. Consequently, they need an explicit emphasis on citation use through introducing disciplinespecific
teaching materials.
Keywords: Literature review, Academic writing, Discourse-based interviews, Systemic Functional
Linguistics.