Citations in search of a purpose: Source use and authorial voice in L2 student writing

Abstract

Although much of the research into source use by international students has tended to focus on issues of plagiarism, there has recently been recognition that their difficulties in this respect may be more pedagogical than moral. However, much remains to be known about the nature of such students? source use. In order to throw light on the ways in which novice L2 writers use source material in their writing and to understand what difficulties they experience, this paper reports on a small case study involving a group of Japanese postgraduate students. Analysis of five Pre-Master?s dissertations written by these students, as well as interviews conducted with the writers, revealed that they varied in their ability to handle source material effectively. In many cases, their use of source material appeared to be symptomatic of weak authorial stance and apparent lack of a clear argument. Based on these findings, the study concludes with the recommendation that instruction on the use of source material focus to a greater extent on its rhetorical function in constructing knowledge.

An Analysis of the Citation Practices of Undergraduate Spanish Students

“…Several researchers have pointed out that one of the main reasons for poor referencing is that students are unaware that academic discourse is intertextual and dialogic and that knowledge is socially constructed by developing and responding to others' ideas (Chanock 2008, McCulloch 2012. As a consequence, students often fail to evaluate and recontextualize sources to create and support their own arguments.…”

“…Texts written by university students exhibit frequent examples of textual practices unacceptable by their prospective discourse community, which include, but are not limited to, textual plagiarism, e.g. long fragments copied from source text without acknowledgement, partially attributed borrowings, excessive quotation and scarcity of summaries and paraphrases, patchwriting, limited range of reporting verbs, lack of evaluation (Abasi, Akbari and Graves 2006, Davis 2013, McCulloch 2012, Pecorari 2003, and Shi 2004.…”

“…There is wide agreement amongst scholars that poor referencing and inappropriate use of sources do not usually result from an intention to deceive, but from the challenges that students face when attempting to produce writing that is expected to meet the standards of expert writing (Howard 1995, Pecorari 2003. Many factors have been identified as contributing to the difficulties experienced by student writers, among them lack of awareness of which textual practices are considered plagiarism and of when and how they have to make reference to sources, and a belief that it is acceptable to borrow others' ideas without acknowledging them (Chanock 2008, McCulloch 2012, and Shi 2012. Cultural differences regarding authority, ownership of ideas and the expression of one's own voice may also lead to different perceptions of plagiarism and different attitudes towards the use of others' ideas (Currie 1998, Pennycook 1996.…”

“…Other reasons for the limited ability to use sources is the lack of knowledge of the discourse conventions of the disciplinary community (Abasi and Akbari 2008, Angélil-Carter 2000, Currie 1998, Gu and Brooks 2008, Pecorari 2003, 2006, and Thompson 2005, low levels of academic literacy and poor linguistic skills, e.g. students may acknowledge sources but paraphrase them unskillfully, or they may attribute direct quotations but fail to mark them as such (Chanock 2008, Currie 1998, Howard 1995, McCulloch 2012, Pecorari 2003, Pennycook 1996, and Shi 2004. Interestingly, patchwriting, defined by Howard (1999: xviii) as 'copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one synonym for another' is not generally considered to be the result of dishonesty, but has been accounted for as resulting from developmental needs: patchwriting is a necessary step which may facilitate the development of writing skills (Howard 1999, Pecorari 2003.…”

“…Much of the previous research on the use of sources by student writers has involved postgraduate students and has focused on the analysis of citation practices in PhD or Master theses (e.g. Abasi, Akbari and Graves 2006, Davis 2013, Harwood and Petrić 2012, McCulloch 2012, Pecorari 2003, 2006, although citation in undergraduate dissertations has also been studied (Schembri 2009). Less attention has been paid to how less expert students struggle to integrate sources in their assignments, although the challenges that these students may experience when using sources will probably be different from those experienced by postgraduates or undergraduates writing their dissertation.…”