An Analysis of the Citation Practices of Undergraduate Spanish Students

Abstract

One basic skill of academic writers is to be able to locate their claims within a disciplinary framework. However, undergraduate students find it difficult to integrate sources into their own writing successfully, which often results in inappropriate textual borrowing and poor referencing. The aim of the research reported here was to identify problematic or inappropriate use of sources in texts produced by undergraduate Spanish students and examine the reasons for these unacceptable citation practices. For this purpose, I analyzed a learner corpus consisting of 35 literature reviews written by students of an EAP subject in the third year of a Bachelor's Degree in English Studies. The results suggest that their inappropriate use of sources arises mainly from three factors: (i) an unawareness of the dialogic nature of academic texts and of the functions of citation in these texts; (ii) low linguistic level and low level of academic literacy regarding the procedures involved in paraphrasing and synthesizing; (iii) lack of familiarity with the language of citations.

Sensitizing Citing Practices of Graduate Students of TEFL in Academic Summary Writing

“…They feared that limited linguistic resources or poor comprehension of the source text might lead them to inaccurately present and communicate the source text content, which ultimately may subject them to the charge of plagiarism. This finding was consistent with L2 studies (e.g., Gebril & Plakans, 2009;Hirvela & Du, 2013;Luzón, 2015;Mori, 2018). Being afraid of copying the source text illegitimately, a few students, however, cited the copied content and language directly to acknowledge the source text authors and their original insights and to show compliance with academic norms.…”

“…Novice university students will likely struggle with weaving the sources and ideas smoothly into their writings to contextualize their arguments and findings, drawing a line between their ideas and those of the source texts (Abasi & Akbari, 2008). They are also concerned with indicating whether findings and arguments from various authors and sources cohere together well and, if so, how to establish a conceptual connection between them (Luzón, 2015). Another problem in the students' STU, mainly if they are from an L2 background, is their tendency to overuse direct quotations when they can represent the information differently in their words using summarizing or paraphrasing (Luzón, 2015).…”

“…They are also concerned with indicating whether findings and arguments from various authors and sources cohere together well and, if so, how to establish a conceptual connection between them (Luzón, 2015). Another problem in the students' STU, mainly if they are from an L2 background, is their tendency to overuse direct quotations when they can represent the information differently in their words using summarizing or paraphrasing (Luzón, 2015). Such a tendency prevents students from self-presenting and establishing their authorial stance.…”

Retórica intercultural en el discurso académico universitario: las funciones retóricas de la citación en los Trabajos de Fin de Máster escritos en español y en inglés por hablantes nativos y no nativos

“…De mayor interés para nuestro estudio resulta la exploración de la variabilidad entre los géneros. El comportamiento de las citas se ha investigado principalmente en el artículo de investigación (entre otros, Swales, 1990;Hyland, 1999;Fløttum, Kinn y Dahl, 2006;Mur-Dueñas, 2009) y la tesis doctoral (entre otros, Dong, 1996;Thompson y Tribble, 2001;Gallardo, 2010;Soler-Monreal y Gil-Salom, 2011), aunque en los últimos años ha venido creciendo la atención prestada a la práctica de la citación en el género que analizamos en este artículo, el Trabajo de Fin de Máster (Petrić, 2007;Jalilifar, 2012;Rabab´ah y Al-Marshadi, 2013;Samraj, 2013;Sánchez-Jiménez, 2013, 2016, 2018a, 2021Oskueia y Kuhi, 2014;Nguyen y Pramoolsook, 2016), así como en los cursos universitarios de grado (Mansourizadeh y Ahmad, 2011;Luzon, 2015;Viemeyer, 2017;Wette, 2017;Lee, Hitchcock y Casal, 2018;Zhang, 2018;Gao, Picoral y Staples, 2021;Meihami y Esfandiari, 2021). En síntesis, se ha comprobado en estos trabajos que los escritores expertos utilizan una mayor variedad de funciones de las citas en sus textos dependiendo del propósito retórico de cada apartado del escrito, mientras que, por el contrario, los universitarios se limitan a reproducir el conocimiento sobre el tema investigado mediante la atribución del conocimiento a la fuente original en todo el texto, como informan de manera más específica los estudios que han contrastado la práctica de la citación entre la escritura académica de expertos y estudiantes universitarios (Mansourizadeh y Ahmad, 2011;Jalilifar, 2012;Sánchez-Jiménez, 2020a;Meihami y Esfandiari, 2021).…”

Plagiarism and English for academic purposes: A research agenda

“…It has also been observed that the phenomenon of appropriating words and phrases from source texts is intertwined with the writer's developing academic literacy skills (e.g., Howard, 1995; Jamieson, 2019; Luzón, 2015), and for this reason a great deal of research on plagiarism has been done within the specialised area of English for Academic Purposes (EAP): it is a topic of interest to EAP teachers because they are charged with teaching the skills of academic writing. Research in EAP and closely related areas (such as second-language (L2) writing and composition studies) has investigated topics such as the expectations of teachers across the academic community (Pecorari & Shaw, 2012; Sutherland-Smith, 2008) and the prevalence of plagiarism in student writing (Howard et al, 2010; Pecorari, 2003).…”