This volume contains the proceedings of the Doctoral Symposium at the 5th International Conference on Software Language Engineering, 25th of September 2012, hosted by the Faculty of Information Science of the Technical University of Dresden, Germany. Previous editions were held in Braga, Portugal (2011), Eindhoven, Netherlands (2010), Colorado, USA (2009) and Toulouse, France (2008). The International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE) aims to bring together the di erent sub-communities of the software-languageengineering community to foster cross-fertilisation and to strengthen research overall. Within this context the Doctoral Symposium at SLE 2012 contributes towards these goals by providing a forum for both early and late-stage PhD students to present their research and get detailed feedback and advice from researchers both in and out of their particular research area.