While research on students’ development in
thesis writing has recently proliferated and much has been revealed about their
intramental development and mediating resources, little is known about how students learn and develop from the
intermental to the intramental plane with expert others’ assistance. To fill in
this gap, the study uses Vygotsky’s
sociocultural approach to development and speaking/thinking system as the
conceptual framework and examines two Master’s students’ thesis writing process
with data collected from interviews, stimulated recall, process logs, and multi-drafts
of their theses. The findings show that the participants mainly made
sense of teachers’ meanings, meanings in literature, and their own meanings as
they developed
from expert others’ mediation to self mediation and internalization. These
three processes seemed to be intricately interwoven and together
contribute to the participants’ development of znachenie
slova and systems of
concepts in their speaking/thinking system, with making sense of meanings in
literature particularly challenging for them. The factors that facilitated
and constrained
their sense making are discussed and pedagogical implications are drawn.
