141 / 2018-08-05 17:40:46

Contrastive Analysis of Types and Functions of Citations in Academic Writings by Learners and Experts

Research articles, Citation, Chinese graduate students

全体主题 > 学术与职业英语的教学与研究

The use of citations, i.e. source texts, is one of the unique features of academic writings, through which writers can enter into a dynamic academic dialogue with their peers and readers in the discourse community. Academic writers use different citation forms for different rhetorical purposes in the development of academic papers. However, novice writers of academic writing, i.e. Chinese graduate students in this case, often encounter various difficulties in using citations. The current study aims to find out how Chinese postgraduate students in non-English disciplines, use citations in constructing their research articles in comparison to those of the experts, who are scholars in the same discipline with English as their L1 or who work in English speaking countries. The corpora consist of 30 research article manuscripts written by learners and 30 published research articles by experts in the discipline of Energy and Power Engineering. Systematic analyses of the data find that citations in learner’s RAs distribute differently across different sections in comparison to those of expert’s, especially in the Results and Discussion section. Moreover, citation types and functions used by learners are significantly different in comparison to those of experts, so is the case with reporting verbs. All these findings point to leaner’s weakness in synthesizing literature and in using literature to interpret and evaluate their own research. Focused instructions should be designed to raise learner’s awareness of the types and functions of citation as well as to develop their strategies to engage with the literature more critically and in more depth.