A Study On The Use Of Textual Borrowing Strategies In Academic Writing By Advanced English Learners

Academic writing attracts much attention of the scholars due to its importance in the advanced language learning phase. Textual borrowing is a natural process for students to involve reading in academic writing. It is also a major strategy used by EFL students in their thesis due to their incompetence in academic writing. There are appropriate textual borrowing and inappropriate textual borrowing in academic writing. This study investigates textual borrowing strategies from linguistic and developmental perspectives It classifies textual borrowing strategies into five categories, that is, exact copy strategy, near copy strategy, minimal revision strategy, moderate revision strategy and absolute paraphrase strategy.The current research explores the textual borrowing strategies that English majors use in their academic writing. The research aims to address the following issues:1) the general situation of sophomores'use of textual borrowing strategies; 2) the general situation of postgraduates'use of textual borrowing strategies; 3) the difference in the use of the two groups on textual borrowing strategies. Participants were made up of two groups of students, one of 30 sophomores and the other of 30 second-year postgraduates, all of whom were English majors from a university in Jiangxi province. A summary task was chosen to conduct this research,. The summaries were collected and analyzed in terms of the 5 categories of textual borrowing strategies. The data in the current research was made up of the 60 tasks.The theoretical significance lies in that through the introduction and analysis of textual borrowing strategies the theoretical scale in writing could be enlarged. The pedagogical significance is to get to know the academic writing status of the advanced English learners by analyzing their use of textual borrowing strategies.Quantitative and qualitative approaches were both adopted in this research. The SPSS 16.0 was employed in this study. Descriptive analysis and independent sample test were used to analyze the data in this research in the quantitative aspect. In the qualitative respect, textual borrowing strategies used by participants were analyzed. Besides, an interview was conducted with two college students and two postgraduates as interviewees.The findings of the research are:1) sophomores tended to use more near copy strategy; 2) postgraduates tended to use more moderate revision strategy; 3) Significant difference was found in the use of absolute paraphrase strategy while no distinct difference was found in the use of the other four textual borrowing strategies and in the scores of the two groups.On the basis of the findings above, some advice and implications are put forward. To start with, teachers should pay attention to the instructions of the use of the source text and encourage students to read extensively in order to not confine to the language of the source text. Moreover, students should apply appropriate textual borrowing strategies to improve their academic writing ability. With appropriate textual borrowing strategies, they can free from being regarded as plagiarists as well as improve their academic writing quality especially for novice writers.