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Introduction
For the academic community and scholarship, writing from source texts has long been part of the focus of researchers’ interest, contributing to a growing body of writing literature (Wette, 2010). This crucial academic practice-involving the complex processes of accumulation, comprehension, evaluation, contextualization, and inference-is far from merely selecting and incorporating the relevant sources into one’s text (Hirvela & Du, 2013). However, engagement with the source texts has been shown to confound and, at times, frustrate novice student writers incapable of adhering to the academic conventions and their standard practices and perspectives. Textual complexities and personal factors (e.g., academic experience, cultural and linguistic background, rhetorical limitations; Chandrasoma et al., 2004) can lead students to disregard source texts, which may give rise to questionable practices. The incidence and practice of deliberate or inadvertent academic plagiarism are high, particularly among second language (L2) writers not fully initiated into the nature of source-text use (STU) and the critical components of academic knowledge construction and attribution (Pecorari, 2003).
Citing Practices
An issue of concern and interest regarding university students’ STU has been the strategies deployed in citing a source text (Keck, 2014) and whether they are intended to display knowledge or transform understanding (Hirvela & Du, 2013). To either present knowledge “as discrete information bits” (McCarthy-Young & Leinhardt, 1998, p. 25) or construct transformative knowledge and content, writers draw on citation practices and STU strategies to differing extents. For instance, paraphrasing, as one of the most valued academic discourse strategies, involves rewriting and recreating a new passage that is usually as complex as the original text (Hedgcock & Ferris, 2009). It is achieved not only through the lexico-grammatical transformation of the essential constituents of a sentence to restate similar ideas but also through the addition of lexicalized expressions or phrases to infer those ideas (Keck, 2010). Summarizing also demands critical response and transformation of the components, analyzing the content, and making deductions or connections, mainly amounting to passage reduction and reformulation (Yamada, 2003). Partial, inaccurate paraphrases that comprise sentence rearrangement and lexical or phrasal substitution are, however, characterized as patchwriting, which, despite researchers’ interpretation as a bona fide practice and a natural intermediate stage in the writers’ academic development, constitutes plagiarism by some strict disciplinary stipulations and plagiarism policies (Howard, 1999). According to Pecorari (2003), patchwriting is critical to the social construction of identity and discourse and needs to be dealt with pedagogically.
Citing Challenges
Many researchers (e.g., Howard, 2001; Wette, 2017) concur that cognitive and linguistic difficulties and poor comprehension skills may account for the university students’ poor scholarship and patchwriting. Novice university students will likely struggle with weaving the sources and ideas smoothly into their writings to contextualize their arguments and findings, drawing a line between their ideas and those of the source texts (Abasi & Akbari, 2008). They are also concerned with indicating whether findings and arguments from various authors and sources cohere together well and, if so, how to establish a conceptual connection between them (Luzón, 2015). Another problem in the students’ STU, mainly if they are from an L2 background, is their tendency to overuse direct quotations when they can represent the information differently in their words using summarizing or paraphrasing (Luzón, 2015). Such a tendency prevents students from self-presenting and establishing their authorial stance. They might even often prefer to be the voice of privileged authors (Abasi & Akbari, 2008). STU is generally recognized as a common challenge across L1 and L2 students, although it is more frequent in L2 source-based writing (Keck, 2014; van Weijen et al., 2019). In the face of this problem, L2 writers-as compared to their L1 counterparts-tend to cite less commonly, use more exact and near copies (T. A. Hyland, 2009; Keck, 2006; Shi, 2004), and write less authoritatively using rhetorical analysis of the source text concepts (Starfield, 2002).
Healthy but obsessive observation of the principle of citing the owners and their knowledge and ideas may discourage university students from noting the rhetorical considerations of using multiple supporting and conflicting references and voices to back up their research claims and to generate new disciplinary meanings (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011). Their limited cognitive repertoire may also lead them towards fumbling for words or composing narrowly focused content and monologic paraphrases drawn from single sources (Wette, 2017). Some students also lack an understanding of developing a meaningful relationship with the texts and readers (K. Hyland, 2005) and of the cumulative or incremental state of knowledge, that is, of using existing scholarship to establish their territory and ethos and support their hypotheses and positions (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011). Novice university students, in addition, barely tend to be critical of the sources they read and integrate into their texts to either confirm or confront the arguments and interpretations offered by other authors, however authoritative they are (Penrose & Geisler, 1994).
Academic practices, expectations, and instruction significantly influence university students’ academic writing and citational development (Abasi & Akbari, 2008), which also includes negative impacts, mainly originating from the instructors’ unrealistic expectations, such as proficiency and creativity demands, excessive workloads, and time-constrained assignments. Then, students may forgo academic and legitimate citations and resort to copying and patchwriting (Abasi & Akbari, 2008), which reinforces “careless study habits” (Pennycook, 1996, p. 223). Some university instructors may also push students lacking cognitive flexibility and experience with knowledge bases of the topic to construct citations replete with circumlocutory responses and presuppositions (Abasi & Akbari, 2008). They tend to direct the students’ attention to essentially linguistic aspects of STU so that its “rhetorical effect of arguability” (S. H. Lee, 2010, p. 200) is ignored, giving rise to the loss of meaning, coherence, and authorial intention. Such professors’ attitudes and instruction, more specifically, might lead the students to superficial modifications and decontextualized paraphrases and make their transition into rhetorical communication and transformation of scholarly knowledge problematic (Hirvela & Du, 2013). This is also why many L2 students (as evidenced in the literature, e.g., Abasi & Akbari, 2008; Hirvela & Du, 2013; Mori, 2018; Pennycook, 1996) have resorted to more readily to direct quotations, fearing that their interpretations and intentions may not be correctly negotiated.
Pedagogical Approaches to Citing
Given the students’ common problems in STU and academic writing, researchers such as Klein and Samuels (2010), McCarthy-Young and Leinhardt (1998), McDonough et al. (2014), Storch (2012), and Wette (2010) have attempted to provide instructional interventions with focused exercises on the essential components of STU and then track the students’ development in STU and academic literacy skills. Together, the results of the studies, using either implicit or explicit interventions, have reflected a significant decrease in the students’ reliance on direct STU or copied strings of various lengths and an improvement in their source incorporation using explicit references and text-modifying strategies such as paraphrasing and summarizing. However, some less accomplished uses, such as copying shorter combinations of words verbatim (McDonough et al., 2014), seamless integration of the claims and ideas, and citing secondary sources firsthand, were also reported (Wette, 2010), suggesting that students need more practice and professionalism in their STU.
Viewed as an assignment genre providing access to cumulative literature and its discursive and linguistic constructs (Howard, 1992), summary writing has been widely used in the literature to examine college students’ source text documentation and incorporation skills (e.g., Keck, 2014; McDonough et al., 2014; Shi, 2004). Macbeth (2006), for instance, in her study of L2 students’ summary writing, found that the students’ attempt at meeting cultural demands-or what she called their “curriculum of judgments”-of completing the assignment limited their critical understanding of the source text, the application of appropriate integration approaches, and the function of summary writing. However, Macbeth’s 2010 summary study of L2 students was guided by a “skeleton model.” She found that the intervening model contributed to a better selection of the source text excerpts and arrangement of the ideas; however, it failed to assist the students in their attribution and academic writing practices. Similarly, Johns and Mayes (1990) followed Kintsch and van Dijk’s (1978) summary framework to analyze the summaries produced by high and low-proficiency L2 students. The model, which comprised the interaction of two basic idea units: micro- and macro-propositions, involved cognitive realization and mental activation of deletion, generalization, and construction processes. During summarization, the key concepts should be identified and synthesized to develop the central theme, then contextualized and supported by extra information provided by the reader’s deduction and points of view. The results indicated that the low proficiency group replicated the single propositions directly while the high proficiency group produced a coherent synthesis of the different clauses or propositions. In another study, Keck (2014) found that both L1 and L2 student writers commonly cited some sentences and ideas, perhaps because these conveyed well the reduced gist of the text. They summarized the source texts strategically and rhetorically, paraphrasing the ideas instead of copying them verbatim. However, Keck posited that the expository nature of the assigned readings might have induced the student writers to think that source-text ideas had to be paraphrased or copied sequentially.
Sensitization in writing and its impact were also studied in the instructional literature. Castillo and Rojas (2014), for instance, investigated a cohort of L2 students’ sensitization to the development of academic “content” and “language” in writing by introducing creative writing strategies that involved “recognizing facts,” “reflecting on them,” and “proposing a solution to a problem.” The sensitizing strategy led to a conceptual and critical understanding of the context. The students made significant progress in their writing; they learned to merge their voices and individualize their views. They also, specifically, improved sentence organization and extended more care concerning conjunctions and linking words.
Shih (1986) examined the students’ development of academic writing and researching skills by incorporating a content-based module comprising content-based minicourses, academic literacy courses, content-based English-for-special-purposes courses, and multiskill and individualized courses. She found that the sensitizing module contributed to the extensive incorporation of thinking and rhetorical processes in academic writing. Content curriculum and instruction lent further support to the expansion and interpretation of “core content,” which enabled the students to reflect and transfer their understanding to new subject areas and generate a growing perception of writing as a situated social and individual practice.
A pedagogical technique in teaching writing, mainly STU documented in the citation-based literature, is modeling illustrative resources and papers. For example, using exemplary documents, McCarthy-Young and Leinhardt (1998) monitored the students’ academic practices and citation progress. Their study indicated that consulting literacy models and scholarly exemplars allowed coherent integration and reasoned interpretation of the content and enabled the students to construct arguments by “weaving local casual chains into their list structure or specify factors and arguments bits into their casual structure” (p. 58). Similarly, Merkel (2019) examined how undergraduate L2 writers develop proficiency in academic writing and citation construction by getting students to juxtapose and check their citations against exemplary texts. This modeling approach assisted the students in locating reliable digital content and sources to cite and use, constructing interpreted content and paraphrases, and citing the key terminology appropriately.
Despite these sporadic efforts, no previous research uses sensitization as a consciousness-raising approach to examine the MA students’ STU and citation development. Given the graduate students’ common challenges in academic writing from the source texts in an L2 context, this study thus aimed to see how sensitization through studying scholarly publications about STU variation and problems affects graduate L2 students’ citation practices. The following research questions guide this qualitative, intervention-based study.
RQ1: Which citing strategies did graduate students of TEFL use in academic summary writing? Why did they use a specific citing strategy?
RQ2: How did sensitization, if any, affect the students’ citing practices in academic summary writing?
Method
Research Context and Participants
This study examined the MA graduate students’ summaries before and after sensitization to different methods of citation and STU problems. The participants were 16 second-semester TEFL students from a university in Iran. All the students had already passed a required two-credit writing course, which required the students to cite the relevant source texts when writing and seeking support from the literature. The participants’ names used here are all fictitious.
Summary Tasks
The study involved two summary tasks, one ordinary and irrelevant to STU, and one sensitizing the participants’ consciousness and perception of university students’ citing behaviors and problems by asking them to study and summarize an article dealing with university students’ citing practices and challenges. We first searched for a text for the second task. After searching through a series of academic resources and references, we chose the article entitled “Textual Appropriation and Citing Behaviors of University Undergraduates” by Shi (2008) because of its suitability to sensitize the participants to the significance and academic use of source texts. The article for the first task had to be different in content but comparable in structure and rhetorical features, most logically from the same journal. We chose “Interpreting Inexplicit Language During Courtroom Examination” by J. Lee (2009), with a length similar to that of Shi’s and a negligible readability score difference. We made minor changes to the original papers by creating a rubric describing what the participants were supposed to do. We then removed all demographic and citational information from the papers and the abstracts because the participants were supposed to develop a summary comparable to the original abstracts. We also changed the titles of the two papers.
Data Collection and Analysis
The data for this study came from two summary writing tasks assigned individually to each participant and collected over four weeks in June and July 2020. Just after each task, the students participated in an individual 45-minute retrospective interview about STU in their summaries (see Appendix). Both tasks and the interview questions were piloted with one participant. It resulted in some amendments to the interview questions and task requirements, such as setting no time limit for task completion. Due to COVID-19 preventive measures, the second researcher conducted the interviews in English over the telephone. Because of the sensitivity associated with source-based writing and the possibility of detecting textual appropriation and plagiarism, we assured the participants that their contributions were confidential, would be used anonymously, and that there would be no score for the summaries. Those who agreed to participate signed a consent form.
Before the interviews, we located where STU occurred in the students’ written summaries and annotated them manually by line numbers and then compared the instances of STU case by case, which incrementally generated two citational categories of (a) direct STU and (b) indirect STU (see Table 1). Direct STU was further grouped into citations directly quoted from the sources and those copied verbatim without quotation marks. Indirect STU comprised citations completely reformulated and paraphrased with no trace of the source text and those partially reformulated and patchwritten with some lexical or syntactic traces. Both researchers conducted the STU analysis, with a few differences resolved by further analysis and discussion.
Table 1 Textual Comparison
| Borrowed sentences | Source sentences | |
| Direct quotation | “Legal professionals as well as court interpreters need to appreciate that Clarification may be necessary for the sake of achieving interpreting accuracy.” (p. 111) | Legal professionals as well as court interpreters need to appreciate that Clarification may be necessary for the sake of achieving interpreting accuracy. |
| Verbatim copy | This article infers from the study that court interpreters should not be held responsible for making sense of ambiguous utterances. | This article infers from the study that court interpreters should not be held responsible for making sense of ambiguous utterances. |
| Patchwriting | It is desirable to say that when interpreters feel free to disclose such problems, the court will hear the evidences accurately and this leads to correct decision making. | Only when interpreters feel free to disclose such issues related to the integrity of evidence, unafraid of losing face, will the court be able to hear the evidence accurately, as it wishes and as it is required. |
| Paraphrase | It was revealed that the interpreters’ lack of contextual or elliptical knowledge made further clarification and interpretation problematic. | Whenever clarification was needed due to ellipted subjects creating a difficulty in interpreting, Interpreter 1 did not ask for the court’s permission to seek clarification, and did not disclose to the court what the minor conversation was about or why such a clarification was needed. |
The interview data analysis was conducted inductively and recursively using the thematic coding procedures suggested by Braun and Clarke (2006). The recorded interview data were initially played back, transcribed verbatim, and then studied in-depth for meaningful insights and “stretch[es] of discourse” (Nelson & Carson, 1998, p. 119). Insights of particular interest to the study were incrementally identified and coded and further summarized and collated in categories based on similarity in content. Data collation then resulted in the development of overarching themes and subthemes, which were consistently reviewed and proofread to ensure that the themes and categories best represented the students’ voices and views from the interviews. Then, the emerging themes, including discrepant findings, were refined by deletion, decomposition, or integration into one theme. Themes in the further analysis were interpreted by the researchers and supported by exemplary comments and quotes from the participants. For further clarification and confirmation of the emergent codes and categories, analytic memos aided the analysis (Saldaña, 2011), and the themes and findings were shared and cross-checked with a few participants for “member checking or validation” (see Bazeley, 2013; Creswell, 1998).
It should be noted that the second researcher coded the data and prepared an overview of themes. The first researcher reviewed the thematic categories and codes for inter-rater reliability on approximately 20% of the data. The agreement rate was 83%. The researchers resolved the differences in interpretation and analysis by further discussion and amendments, obtaining agreement on 95% of the coded data. Then, the data were reanalyzed by the second researcher.
Findings
The emergent themes are presented and discussed in response to the research questions from the participants’ perspective.
Participants’ Citation Practices in Academic Summary Writing and Reasons for Using a Specific Strategy
The first research question addressed the students’ actual citing strategies in summarizing a source text before sensitization. Textual analysis indicated they generally used multiple strategies in the same summary. We collated the strategies used and the justifications and views expressed by all those students who used a particular strategy. The results revealed that about 71% of the students’ summary citations were direct STU comprising direct quotations (11%) and verbatim copying (60%). Limited understanding and language proficiency, source text comprehensiveness, and publication improbability emerged as the most common reasons for reproducing the summary verbatim. One of the most common reasons for these students to rely on verbatim STU was their difficulty grasping and demonstrating general ideas and concepts. For example, Roya and Fatemeh summarized the source text content verbatim without acknowledgment, assuming that the technicality and sophistication of the source text were “going over their heads.” It was the same for Raha: “I couldn’t change the statements completely; it was a bit difficult for me to do that because I don’t have that depth of knowledge and understanding of the language.” As for limited understanding and linguistic proficiency in STU, Soraya and Sahar were concerned with the accurate interpretation of the source text and its message and feared that the linguistic changes made to the source text might “lower its tone” (Sahar). Verbatim STU was preferred, in addition, when some participants (e.g., Forugh, Marzieyh, and Leyla) found a source text part “concise enough” and closely fitting for what they intended to put in the summary. Two students (Arman and Noushin) did not accurately engage with or cite the source text. The summary, in their view, was not going to be marked by the instructor as a part of their coursework assignment or published.
A few participants directly cited the source text content and language, using quotation marks and page numbers as signs of acknowledgment and text legitimacy. Since they did not have experience in academic writing and publishing, as they acknowledged, they safely opted to cite the source text using quotation marks to show attribution and avoid plagiarism. According to Ali, “since these are someone else’s ideas and not mine and not even a restatement, I decided to include both the citation and quotation marks in my summary.” Negar also thought direct quotations were academically more acceptable than verbatim STU, showing respect for all the “blood, sweat, and tears that went into the author’s work.” It also improves “the worth of the text and possible readers’ trust,” as commented by Raha.
Indirect STU emerged as a citing strategy in the summaries produced by the students, representing 29% of the students’ text citations, of which 22% were patchwritten and 7% were paraphrased. They argued that indirectly citing the text is both linguistically and cognitively demanding, but they occasionally used this instead of direct STU to face the challenge of showing their voice and presence. However, what they did could sometimes be considered patchwriting. For instance, Azadeh, Soraya, and Sara replaced the source text content word for word in their summaries or narrowly changed the source text by rearranging the structure but keeping the words or the other way around. When asked why they did not reformulate the source text beyond this patchwriting, Sara, for example, argued that “this way the summary looked academic, reflecting the source text” and yet demanded not much effort. They generally seemed unaware of the illegitimacy of patchwriting in academic writing; they even looked at patchwriting as an essential transitional step in developing academic writing and literacy skills. Negar, for instance, stated that since she could not interpret and paraphrase some specialized phrases and terms like “culturally and linguistically diverse witnesses,” she preferred to patchwrite, commenting that “half a loaf is better than none.”
In a few cases, the participants preferred and managed to summarize the source text using paraphrasing because paraphrasing the sentences, in their views, made the summary more intelligible, simplified their texts, and demonstrated their mastery and control over the source text. As Ali argued, “I think it would be much more digestible to express this sentence in my own language than to just copy and paste it. Copying has little value, I think.” A recurrent theme and reason for instances of paraphrasing was the participants’ perception that a writer is supposed to integrate the critical parts and essence of source texts succinctly. If “I did not paraphrase those parts and put a lot in a nutshell . . . the summary would be lengthy comprising insignificant source text content,” Noushin argued. For her, “the readers could have different interpretations of a sentence if they lack knowledge of the circumstances in which a sentence occurs.” Another recurrent justification for paraphrasing instances was also the participants’ inclination to show their mastery and control over the source texts integrated into their writing. They deemed that it helped them project their grasp and voice even if reproducing others’ language and ideas in writing. Azadeh, one of the participants who chose paraphrasing to other citing strategies for most of the STU, thought that her renditions reflected her language level and analysis of the source text material. Negar, with a similar tendency, emphasized the need for “making one’s own inferences in writing” and “making [herself] heard,” mainly through paraphrasing. She added that “these instances [of paraphrasing] can best indicate how skillful I was in interpreting the paper and rewriting the gist of it.”
Impact of Sensitization on Students’ Citing Practices
We were also interested in probing how studying a scholarly publication about text citation and STU might influence the participants’ citation practices. The results showed that having students summarize an exemplary citation paper implicitly raised their academic awareness of citing and paraphrasing. In the second summary writing, most students tended to use less direct STU, developing a preference for indirect strategies instead. They also seemed to grow in understanding that writing an academic and coherent summary incorporates their reflections and interpretations of the text. Although 81% of the students cited the summary indirectly, 36% of those citing instances were still patchwritten. Preoccupation with the correctness of text interpretation and conveying also made three students (19%) go on consistently with direct STU.
Most students seemed to have found the STU problems of the study participants described in the second paper analogous to those of their own. Thus, they thought that the strategies used by those participants-or pointed to, discussed, or suggested by the author-could also be used in their summaries, as Arman commented. This was also indicated by Negar: “When reading the article, I felt I didn’t have to merely copy or paraphrase the source text all the time. I learned some sentences were illustrative and meaningful enough to be used directly.” In Forugh’s words, they learned to “vary their thinking and writing skills;” they paraphrased to give an overview of the source text and quoted when they found the content delicate and specific. Hence, this strategy variation taught them the difference between citing the ideas and citing the language in that, according to Sahar, “I cited the ideas but left out its language when I was paraphrasing the source text.” Azadeh also acknowledged that she used to copy the source text content verbatim whenever she could not manipulate and recount a part of it; but, after reading the second article, she learned that this was an instance of “academic dishonesty,” as she frequently noticed this thought-provoking phrase in the text (see Shi, 2008).
It was also evident that studying the sensitizing paper developed the participants’ critical thinking and introspection. The paper, in their views, encouraged them to expand their minds and give voice to their thoughts and text interpretation. Ali, for instance, found it immature to be entirely dependent on the source text. He decided to integrate the source text content into his summary with that gained from his prior knowledge and background readings. As a case in point, Marziyeh recalled a part from the paper that implicitly invited the readers “to infer from the text and [construct] new understandings and meanings . . . and not just [constructing] a citation that includes the name and year of publication.” According to Shi (2008), “citing a source text is more than providing a name and a date; it is a subjective process of deciding how to make meaning out of the available resources” (p. 21). It motivated Marziyeh to legitimize her interpretation and add her voice while citing a part of the source text. Having studied the second paper, Zahra noted how writers’ authority can be built by referring to, supporting, and challenging the prior propositions and knowledge claims, “not intending to be a mere citer or quoter of others’ knowledge.” Negar also acknowledged that she always used to copy the source texts word for word or to change the language of the source texts partially, but now she “understood what interpretive academic writing looks like.”
Discussion
This study investigated TEFL second-semester MA students’ STU in summary writing before and after a sensitizing task. Data analysis showed that, during the first summary task, the students were inclined towards direct STU, particularly verbatim quotes, without explicit acknowledgment, mainly because of limited understanding of and control over the source text or inadequacy of linguistic command. They feared that limited linguistic resources or poor comprehension of the source text might lead them to inaccurately present and communicate the source text content, which ultimately may subject them to the charge of plagiarism. This finding was consistent with L2 studies (e.g., Gebril & Plakans, 2009; Hirvela & Du, 2013; Luzón, 2015; Mori, 2018). Being afraid of copying the source text illegitimately, a few students, however, cited the copied content and language directly to acknowledge the source text authors and their original insights and to show compliance with academic norms. Summarizing the source text with direct quotations rather than verbatim was intended by these participants to demarcate between their ideas and the source-text author’s original contributions. This strategy, as the participants thought-and reported by Hirvela and Du (2013) and Mori (2018)-was intended to enhance their writing legitimacy and acceptability by the readership.
It is generally acknowledged that L2 students perceive paraphrasing in L2 as an intellectual and linguistic burden making them hesitate about their contributions and err on the side of caution by keeping the source text language unaltered to the most considerable extent (Hirvela & Du, 2013). According to Hirvela and Du (2013), this ill-informed, stereotyped view of indirect STU renders it less likely for L2 students to perceive what indirect uses, such as paraphrasing, genuinely have to offer in academic writing. Some participants found the language of the source text integrated into their summaries well-fitting and succinct enough, needing no linguistic manipulation. It is not surprising that L2 students prefer direct STU when they find the source text language and messages authoritative, sophisticated, and yet unambiguous, thus enhancing the scholarly quality of the students’ work (Pennycook, 1996). Although the economical direct STU can help L2 writers develop their arguments and ideas more easily while evading potential misinterpretations of the text, it may also suggest their inability to strike out on their own and build their line of reasoning and communication (Wette, 2017). Studies reporting that direct quotations overrun L2 students’ texts commonly suggest that they misapply the direct STU in a way that their arguments mostly lack rhetorical context and explicit communicative purposes. Consequently, these writers appear to speak for the privileged source-text authors rather than using source texts to formulate their positions and discourses (Abasi & Akbari, 2008). Some participants’ reluctance to engage with the first source text linguistically or rhetorically might also be, as indicated in this study, due to the presumption that the summary was irrelevant to their course assessment or publication.
The students’ summaries, however, occasionally displayed instances of indirect STU that were partially rewritten by plugging in different lexis and restructuring the textual pattern. This occasional patchwriting tendency lays the source text’s far-reaching technical phrases and terms. Thinking that too much dependence on the source text might restrict their abilities to think and write initially, these participants with limited academic writing experience (see Abasi & Akbari, 2008; Leki & Carson, 1997; Wette, 2017) resorted to patchwriting as “an academic survival strategy” (Abasi & Akbari, 2008). L2 writing literature (e.g., Hirvela & Du, 2013; Howard, 1999; Pecorari, 2003; Pennycook, 1996) has frequently pointed to the emergence of patchwriting in L2 students’ early academic writing and learning due to linguistic limitations.
Only a few indirect STU in the participants’ summaries had no lexical or syntactic signs of the source text and could qualify as paraphrasing. Those who opted for paraphrasing thought that a summary had to reflect their grasp, critical reading, and writing skills and that paraphrasing was a means to achieve intelligibility, coherence, and reduction of the content, which is similar to the participants’ perceptions about paraphrasing in Shi’s (2012) and Mori’s (2018) studies. Paraphrasing the source text could also strongly suggest their individuality and relative intellectual independence and voice in their writing. According to Mori, unlike direct quotations, paraphrasing, in the eyes of some students, was a valuable asset in that it ensured their voices were heard when presenting and articulating others’ ideas.
The study mainly investigated the effect of sensitization on the students’ citing practices by using a scholarly paper about STU variation and problems in the second summary task. The sensitizing paper by Shi (2008) seemed to have resulted in a noticeable decrease in the instances of direct STU, while the participants developed a tendency towards indirect uses such as paraphrasing and summing up. They argued that the second paper prompted their perception of the value of how to cite and use the source text academically while giving their reflection and interpretation. When sensitized, they did not merely cite using the source text but learned to contextualize the arguments into their line of reasoning. Overall, there was a traceable shift in their STU from, in McCarthy-Young and Leinhardt’s (1998) terms, “presenting ideas in sequence using empty list constructors to linking them conceptually using causal and qualifier connects” (p. 58). However, patchwriting and verbatim copying remained in their second summaries mainly because of their reluctance or inability to restate complex language and register.
An intriguing theme emerging from the discussion with the participants was how their awareness of the problems and strategies in citing a source text was raised by the second paper and implicitly led them to reflect on their problems and strategies. For instance, they noticed that the participants in the sensitizing paper sometimes oscillated between paraphrasing and directly quoting and realized that both strategies were essential but served different rhetorical purposes in their summary writing. In other words, they noted that they had to summarize and paraphrase the general content and the main idea of the source text “to emphasize and interpret what they are citing” (Hyland & Jiang, 2019, p. 72) while they needed to mine the text for exemplary ideas and cite them directly (Wette, 2017). In this regard, they seemed to have generally perceived the distinctions between citing the language using direct quotations and citing ideas while paraphrasing and summarizing.
They also seemed to have noticed how persistent copying or partial modification were frequently epitomized as dishonest and transgressive in the sensitizing paper compared with more professional STU by experienced writers involving critical responses and subjective analysis of the source text while generating coherent meanings and ideas. They were also sensitized to interpret the source text-rather than merely linguistically cite it-and enrich it with their intentions, voices, and prior experiences. Attempts to integrate their interpretation into the summaries also called for a more critical evaluation of the citations, whether explicitly or implicitly confirmatory or divergent. As also recognized in the literature (Harwood, 2010; McCarthy-Young & Leinhardt, 1998; Petrić & Harwood, 2013; Walker, 2008), drawing on a source text as a mine of linguistic and conceptual information has scaffolded the students to develop their repertoire of practice, and to improve their epistemological orientations to academic literacy practices. It is also argued that frequent reading, adapting, engaging with superior materials, and working within a growing corpus of scholarly research can promote a richer understanding of citation and academic language (Howard, 1999).
Studies tracking undergraduate students’ progress using implicit or explicit pedagogical interventions (e.g., Klein & Samuels, 2010; McCarthy-Young & Leinhardt, 1998; McDonough et al., 2014; Wette, 2010, 2017) have generally pointed to a considerable reduction in the number of students copying from the source text and an improvement in accurate and academic STU that entails indirect STU with critical reflection, interpretation, and evaluation of source texts, generally supporting this study’s findings. As the issue of writing from the source texts might be more significant for graduate L2 academic writers, this study exploited an implicit sensitizing approach to raise the L2 writers’ consciousness of academic writing practices. There have also been numerous discussions on the significance and function of implicit learning in the instructional literature. Tacit engagement with learning materials has been shown to enhance the students’ reflective and interpretive learning and the ability to extrapolate this learning to new academic contexts (Ellis et al., 2009; Jiménez, 2003; Logan & Etherton, 1994; Logan et al., 1996).
Conclusion and Implications
This study probed L2 graduate students’ STU in two summary writing tasks: ordinary and sensitizing. The results showed that they summarized and cited the first source text content using more direct strategies, particularly verbatim quotes, due to limited linguistic confidence or understanding of the text. A few students opted for direct quotations to credit the text’s authorship and increase readability. The participants tended to restate the source text indirectly using patchwriting and paraphrasing to establish their writing voice and authority. When sensitized in the second summary writing, the students integrated more indirect and academic STU with their contribution and interpretation. They also opted for STU strategies more wisely and expressed themselves more authoritatively. The results indicate that limited awareness and skill in academically citing the source texts can induce L2 students to use rather excessive and voiceless direct STU and that writing practices with sensitizing tasks can enhance novice L2 writers’ linguistic autonomy and agency.
The study suggests that using actual academic classics and exemplars can sensitize L2 students to various citing techniques. More specifically, providing students with some exemplars showcasing and discussing citing practices and problems of other L2 students (like the one used in this study) might prove beneficial by raising the L2 academic writers’ awareness of challenges in academic literacies and understanding that some of such challenges are common and not exclusive to their writing endeavors. The implicit approach will, in turn, mainly through practice, develop their confidence in reflective STU and will likely generate a cognitive shift from more direct strategies to more interpretive STU. Professors of writing courses and research methodologies are also recommended to present, for example, published articles from journals following specific and clear citing procedures and styles similar to the practices the students should follow in their academic writing. They can demonstrate and discuss how professional writers tackled STU problems.
It is also worth noting that this study attempted to look into some L2 students’ STU. Further sensitizing studies with larger samples of students and various L2 or L1 backgrounds, levels, and experiences can be undertaken to ensure the generalizability of the findings. Such research avenues might lend themselves to more quantitative methodologies. If appropriate, even mixed-methods studies can be exploited to look more comprehensively into STU, variables, and stakeholders.
