Enabling PhD students to participate as writers in international debates

Writing for publication in English is a significant challenge for Japanese PhD students. They not only have the usual anxiety experienced by PhD students writing for publication but also the added burden of being told continually that
Japanese students are no good at English. We adopted an approach that was effective in western higher education: structured writing retreat. A retreat was run for twelve students from the Graduate School of Human Sciences at Osaka University (funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology). We describe a six-month evaluation of this retreat: post-retreat feedback from students, follow-up workshops two months later and focus groups after four and six months. We used containment theory to explain how this retreat created a structure that contained students’ anxieties about writing for publication in English, enabling them to participate as writers in international debates.