Blurb:

One of the hurdles which all Ph.D. candidates must jump is the dissertation proposal. Both advisors and students may struggle to both teach and write dissertations proposals effectively. By using systemic functional linguistics genre theory as an analytical tool, we provide some concrete language features of effective dissertation proposals, which both advisors and students can utilize when teaching and learning to write their own proposals. Through an explicit discussion of their own dissertation proposals, the authors highlight those language features which best realize the dissertation proposal genre in qualitative educational research.