A Study Of Textual Borrowing Behavior In English Academic Writing By Postgraduates

Academic writing attracts much attention of the scholars at home and abroad.Textual borrowing is a very common phenomenon in L2 academic writing and pervades the whole process of the development of learners'academic writing.It refers to borrowing the language and views of literature resources in academic texts to reflect the intertextual relationship between the written text and source text.However,most previous studies of textual borrowing focused on essay writing rather than academic writing.Previous studies also showed a lack of the exploration to the relationship between different textual borrowing behaviors and academic writing quality.Under the guidance of the Kristeva's intertextuality(1986)and sociocultural theory,this study aims to explore the textual borrowing behavior of postgraduates in their academic writing.It mainly seeks to address the following research questions:(1)What are the main types of textual borrowing behavior used in English academic writing by postgraduates?(2)What are the distribution characteristics of the textual borrowing behavior in each section of English academic writing?(3)What's the relationship between the participants'textual borrowing behavior and their writing quality?10 MA students of the same college were selected in a university in Jiangxi Province as participants.Their academic graduate theses were collected to analyze the different textual borrowing behaviors according to the synthesis of previous coding scheme.Meanwhile,a face-to-face interview was carried out among those participants to reveal their perceptions about textual borrowing behaviors in English academic writing.The SPSS 19.0 was employed to analyze the quantitative data and Spearman Correlation analysis was used to analyze the correlation of data.This study shows the following results:(1)These participants mainly borrowed language from the source text in the form of direct quoting,paraphrasing and summarizing behavior.Paraphrasing behavior was used most among the three textual borrowing behaviors and direct quoting behavior was used least.(2)In each section of their thesis,these textual borrowing behaviors are used most in literature review section and results&discussion section.(3)There is a significant correlation between the employment of paraphrasing and summarizing behaviors and academic writing quality(r=.636~*;r=.671*).The results indicate that these postgraduates possess certain academic writing ability since they can incorporate the source text to construct their own meaning and knowledge in their academic writing.Also,in their writing process,individuals with high academic writing proficiency can better restructure their knowledge with good mastery of language based on the source text.The implications of the present study are:(1)Instructors of English academic writing can teach students to use the paraphrasing and summarizing behavior in order to promote their academic writing ability,especially in literature review and results&discussion section.They can also encourage students to employ the direct quoting behavior based on the guaranteed repetition rate to some extent,so as to develop the sense of writing identity construction.(2)Academic writers should strengthen the training in paraphrasing and summarizing behaviors to improve their academic genre knowledge and mastery of language.(3)In their process of academic English writing development,writers should not be constrained by the source use,but should adopt appropriate,standard and effective textual borrowing behaviors,which is beneficial to the avoidance of the suspicion of plagiarism and high quality of language production.