A Contrastive-comparative Study Of Citation Practices Between Master's Theses And Journal Articles In Applied Linguistics

Citation constitutes a most prominent aspect of academic writing through which writers make known the breadth of their scholarship in a certain area,and announce their disciplinary membership,and is being increasingly studied from various perspectives.For all its importance,there is a paucity of studies regarding citation practices among Chinese second language learners who are found particularly vulnerable to committing less-than-satisfactory source use.Informed by Hu and Wang‘s(2014)analytical framework,this study compares and contrasts citation practices,with regard to citation density,author integratio n,textual integration,and writer stance,in 21 C hinese master ‘s theses and 42 published English journal articles written by Chinese scholars in applied linguistics.The quantitative findings are complemented and subsequently explained by semi-structure interviews with eight third-year high-achieving postgraduate students and two postgraduate supervisors.The study finds that 1)student and expert writers on the whole observe nearly similar citation distribution patterns,as they cite lavishly in the Introduction and Literature Review sections and visibly less in the rest sections,use mainly endorse and acknowledge citation and scant distance and contest citations,and cite an abundance of assimilation citations yet a paltry sum of insertion and insertion + assimilation citations.Such similarities have their roots in the formulaic aspect of academic writing as well as the theory that third-year graduate students are able and willing to follow academic discourse conventions;2)citation practice between the students and experts are different in several ways in that expert writers boast a higher citation density in every section than the student cohort,which is rendered all the more so in the Methodology sections expert writers on the whole cite significantly more endorse yet significantly fewer acknowledge citations than the student cohort,novice students are more likely to quote by clauses while expert writer tilt towards quoting in fragments via insertion + assimilation citations,and novice students document significantly more integral citations,but expert writers write more non-integral source use.Of these differences,students‘ and experts‘ varied perceptions towards certain citation types and their uneven writing competencies are considered to be two major causes.The study could be revealing as it will do good to novice second language writers in realizing and amending their less-than-satisfactory citation practices as compared with expert writers,and offer pedagogical implications in assisting e merging L2 writers in their academic success.