A Study Of Features And Influencing Factors Of Citation Competence In Undergraduate English Majors' L2 Academic Writing

Citation competence,one of the salient features in academic writing,can not only manifest author's knowledge depth and breadth,but also construct research network.In recent twenty years,more and more western scholars focus on writing competence,and features of citation become a hot topic for different fields of scholars.However,in applied linguistics,there is no study on citation competence abroad and there is also few studies on undergraduates' citation competence and its influencing factors in China.Therefore,this study tries to find out features and influencing factors of citation competence in English majors' L2 academic writing.Firstly,the corpus of this study is composed of 100 empirical theses written by undergraduate English majors in Dalian University of Foreign Languages in recent three years.Only literature review,methodology and results and discussion are remained.Based on Xu's(2016)analytic framework of citation competence,the corpus is coded and counted by AntConc3.2.0,and the features of citation competence is worked out.Then,influencing factors are derived from interviewing with eight senior English majors in Dalian University of Foreign Languages.Finally,a questionnaire is composed based on the results of interview.And the constitution of influencing factors stems from the questionnaire.The results of this study are as follows.Firstly,citation competence of undergraduate English majors still needs to be improved.Too much attention on “Opinion explanation” makes content coverage competence not comprehensive enough and the characteristics are not salient in different sections;interpersonal interaction competence is insufficient due to lacking of connection among these citations;discourse integration competence is applied flexibly,but students still prefer integral forms.Based on the questionnaire,there are six influencing factors,namely,obtaining literature,selecting literature,English language proficiency,guiding from supervisor,reading strategies and citation knowledge.The findings of this study unveil students' shortcomings in citation competence so as to improve their citation use in academic writing.Meanwhile,it is also referable for teachers to improve their teaching plans when they are guiding students' academic writing,thus helping students improve their citation competence.