Abstract

Postgraduate supervisors' interaction with their students, the feedback they provide them, and their relationship with them are very important factors in the latter's successful completion of their studies. However, students' perceptions about the quality of their supervisors' feedback and its usefulness in the thesis revision process have not been thoroughly investigated. Further, only a few studies have been conducted on postgraduate students' perceptions of their supervisors' feedback. The present study focused on ESL students' perceptions of supervisors' oral and written feedback on their thesis drafts. Using in-depth semi-structured interviews, and global supplementary interviews, the study discovered that students perceived their supervisors' feedback as crucial, helpful, and useful in the revision of their drafts as well as in the associated research activities. Students, however, perceived written feedback as more useful than oral feedback. Furthermore, oral feedback was not perceived as intrinsically useful and even as detrimental to students who had low linguistic and communication skills. They indicated that the most useful types of feedback were those that focused on content, research methods, discourse flow, and effective arguments. It was concluded that the students generally perceived their supervisors' oral and written feedback as valuable input worthy of incorporation into their thesis drafts despite their own shortcomings in comprehending or responding to the feedback.