Introduction

Research supervision and research education success have been issues of extensive interest for educators at the tertiary level. Much attention is being paid to what happens in the university setting (for example, Casanave & Li, 2008; McCallin & Nayar, 2011). At the same time, research mentoring in medical contexts, which involves senior clinician researchers and medical students or junior clinician researchers, has also been an issue of long-standing interest in academic medicine (for example, DeCastro, Sambuco, Ubel, Stewart & Jagsi, 2013). Yet although there seems to be some consensus on what characterises a good mentor and what an effective mentoring relationship might be like (Casanave & Li, 2008; Zerzan, Hess, Schur, Phillips & Rigotti, 2009), surprisingly little is known as to how research supervision and mentoring actually unfolds in its natural settings, especially as to how it is manifested through the mentor's verbal communication. In Asia and elsewhere in the world, given the widespread requirement for research students to publish — especially at the doctoral level across the disciplines of science and medicine — including in English-medium international journals (for example, Barbero, 2008; Huang, 2010; Li, 2016), understanding the process of research supervisory communication will have theoretical and pedagogical implications. The present chapter aims to make a contribution in this direction by reporting a study on how the director of the Orthopedics Department at a major Chinese hospital mentors his students through verbal communication to push the novices to work hard in scientific research and publication. I will first give a brief overview of the potential benefits for medical students of engaging in research and the challenge that their supervision poses in Chinese hospitals.

I will then outline the theoretical background of the study, based as it is on some tenets drawn from cultural-historical activity theory [CHAT] (Engestrom, 1987, 2000, 2001, 2009; Engestrom, Miettinen & Punamaki, 1999).

Medical students as researchers and the publication requirement for Chinese medical students

Literature in medical education suggests that it is professionally significant for medical students to engage in research and publishing. It has been acknowledged that research prepares medical students for the practice of medicine, for ‘the ability to understand and integrate new knowledge into clinical practice is a necessary quality of good physicians’ (Parsonnet, Gruppuso, Kanter & Boninger, 2010, p. 405).