How to Write a Better Thesis

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Chapter 5

The Introductory Chapter

Imagine, for a moment, that your thesis is an important person you are meeting for
the first time. It would be normal to be introduced as questions raced through your
head: Where are you from? How did you get here? What are you doing here? What
type of person are you? What have you done so far, and where are you going? As
in social settings, I’ve noticed that students are sometimes in a rush to ‘get started’
and fumble the all-important first impression. Take some time to write the intro-
duction properly, and revise it on a regular basis as your research project matures.
Introductions are crucial, and it speaks for you as you strive to join an international
community of scholars.
The purpose of the first chapter of your thesis is to introduce your work, period. I
recommend that it be relatively short (seven to ten pages), and that it consist of five
brief components: Context of the Study, Statement of the Problem, Aim and Scope,
Significance of the Study and, finally, an Overview.

Establishing a Context

Your initial task is to situate your study so that readers can understand your specific
points of concern. Before you begin talking about the problem, you must first pro-
vide some context to it. If you ignore this initial section, your readers may feel as if
they have entered a conversation that has already started without them.
Of the many possible sources of inspiration that stimulate research, responding
to a specific issue within an established agenda for research is perhaps the most
common. By situating your work in this way, you immediately put yourself in dia-
logue with those in your field. Here’s how Aek started his doctoral thesis:

From ‘Chapter One: Introduction’ in Phakiti, Aek. (2003). An Empirical Investigation Into

the Relationships of State-trait Strategy Use to L2 Reading Comprehension Test Perfor-

mance: A Structural Equation Modelling Approach, p. 1. Unpublished PhD thesis, Univer-

sity of Melbourne.

Broadly speaking, the language testing (LT) research framework stretches along a con-

tinuum. At one end, investigators assess and describe the language ability of an individual;

D. Evans et al., How to Write a Better Thesis, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-04286-2_5,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014