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A Comparative Study Of Citation Practices Between Master's Theses And Journal Articles

Posted on:2020-04-21Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:Y F ChengFull Text:PDF
GTID:2405330596485524Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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Citation,as one of the central features of scholarly papers,is an integral part of academic writing and serves myriad cognitive and rhetorical functions.Citing source texts appropriately not only indicates that the writer has a wide range of disciplinary knowledge,but also enhances thesis' s reliability and persuasiveness and improves the overall quality of the paper.According to previous studies,in the course of writing English academic papers,L2 students,particularly Chinese postgraduate students have difficulties in integrating external sources into the running text.This study,therefore,explores how student and expert writers incorporate others' voices into their texts,and the differences between them.The results of the study could provide better understanding of the citation patterns from different perspectives and offer pedagogical opportunities for teaching academic writing to novice researchers.Based on the dimensions of intertextuality ability,the study,with the help of corpus technology and Chi-square and log-likelihood software,compares and contrasts the citation practices in academic writings by Chinese postgraduate students and international experts.It was found that in terms of citation density,compared with expert writers,Chinese postgraduates used fewer citations in constructing their texts.These student writers in this study,however,integrated source texts much more frequently than L2 thesis writers in Petri?'s(2007)study,which demonstrates that these students have recognized the importance of quoting massages frequently in academic writing.In terms of author integration,data analysis shows that both groups of writers,students and experts,made use of more non-integral citations than integral ones,despite the fact that students used significantly more integration citations than international experts.In addition,although both students and experts employed more verb-controlling integral citation than naming ones,the former used verb-controlling integral citations much more frequently than the latter.In terms of the textual integration,there were significant differences,with the JAs using assimilation and insertion +assimilation more frequently and the MTs deploying more insertion.In terms of rhetorical function,findings demonstrate that attribution was the prominent citation function in studentpapers followed by the function of identification.However,students rarely relied on other more sophisticated functional types.In contrast,what considerably more occurred in the paper of experts was exemplification,and also experts wielded the functions of origin and reference effectively and skillfully.Finally,with regard to author stance,students' attitudes towards cited sources were neutral in the form of acknowledge or distance.Unlike students,experts expressed their positive or negative attitudes through integrating endorse and contest citations with the density of endorse citations higher than the contest.This study attempts to disclose the similarities and differences of citation practices in scholarly papers between Chinese postgraduate students and international experts.Findings of the present study offer some pedagogical implications for the teaching of L2 academic writing.Instructors are advised to give students more explicit guidance on the use of citation functions and citation strategies while students are encouraged to accumulate more proper expressions of citation and learn from model articles written by experts.
Keywords/Search Tags:Citation practices, Academic writing, Master theses, Journal articles
PDF Full Text Request
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