An examination of education-based dissertation macrostructures

This article describes a large-scale analysis of dissertation macrostructures in the Faculties of Education at five major Canadian research universities. We draw on van Dijk (1980) and Paltridge (2002) in categorizing the global organizational patterns of 1,373 PhD dissertations and cross reference these patterns with each study’s research perspective. Although prior research has addressed thesis and dissertation writing by drawing on ESP and...