The nature of the processes in writing a thesis as a genre: supervisor support, feedback, response to feedback and editing

The aim of this study is to enlighten thesis writing processes of a group of MA thesis supervisees and the academic and affective support provided in the thesis writing process from the perspectives of supervisees and supervisors in a case study research design. The participants were six supervisors and their eight supervisees from three ELT programs of three state universities in Türkiye. The data was collected by a background questionnaire, semi-structured oral interviews and documents, including all thesis drafts, along with any semiotic resources shaping the meaning in their writing processes. Semi-structured interviews conducted with participating supervisors and supervisees were analysed by thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke 2006), whereas the feedback data collected from emails, notes and theses drafts was analysed by a text-oriented heuristic (Lillis & Curry, 2006), post-stucturalist and translingual perspectives (Canagarajah, 2018) and Sociocultural Theory framework. The findings revealed that thesis writing is a social process affected by cognitive, behavioural, and affective dimensions. The supervisees expected to meet with their supervisors regularly, get personalized, ongoing and timely feedback, and get supervisors' guidance about how to write a thesis. They seemed to struggle from linguistic difficulties, sociocultural issues and personal issues whereas their supervisors, friends, families and their personalities helped their thesis writing process. The supervisors mostly asked their supervisees to add, reformulate, and delete things, do sentence- level corrections, and change cohesion markers. Besides, they mostly give feedback to linguistic knowledge although supervisees expected to feedback to their topical knowledge, research knowledge and academic writing knowledge.