CLER Conversation: Development of source use and citing in MA student writing: A longitudinal approach

Bojana Petrić from Birkbeck, University of London presents CLER Conversation: Development of source use and citing in MA student writing: A longitudinal approach on 9th June at 4pm to 5.30pm in the Hillary Place Coach House Seminar Room. 

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Abstract: Students’ difficulties mastering source use and citation when learning to write in academic settings are now well documented; however, despite general agreement that mastering source use requires a long time and a great deal of practice, studies investigating how source use develops over time are still rare. Much of the existing research that takes the temporal dimension into account uses pre-post test designs, where only two developmental points in time are examined, or tracks a set of pre-determined features of writers’ citing behaviour, thus failing to capture citing practices in full. Drawing on a recent longitudinal case study (Petrić & Harwood, forthcoming), which aimed to trace changes in the citing practices of a master’s student during a one-year course of study at a UK university, I will discuss the merits of investigating citing practices longitudinally, using multiple methods and multiple waves of data collection, and treating citing practices as an advanced capacity, i.e. ‘sophisticated language use in context’ (Ortega & Byrnes, 2008, p.4).

The study draws on multiple data sources (samples of the participant’s writing, markers’ reports and lecturers’ feedback, repeated interviews with the participant, university documentation), collected during three distinct periods within the academic year: a 5-week pre-sessional academic English course, the taught part of the master’s programme, and the supervised dissertation. The study documented changes in the participant’s citing patterns and her understanding of citing. The overall picture is of a non-linear, uneven development, marked by simultaneous acquisition of more complex citing practices and fluctuation in the already adopted ones. The findings reveal the complex nature of citing, whose mastery requires effective coordination of multiple domains: discursive (e.g., use of reporting verbs), conceptual (e.g., awareness of the rhetorical purposes of citations) and technical (e.g., accurate use of citation styles). This implies that teaching citation should target both students’ discursive practices and their awareness of citing.

Bojana Petrić is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Her research explores academic writers’ literacy practices and experiences. She has published in journals such as Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Journal of Second Language Writing, Language Teaching, and Writing & Pedagogy, and has co-authored (with Nigel Harwood) Experiencing Master’s supervision: Perspectives of international students and their supervisors (2017) and co-edited (with Sanja Bahun) Thinking home: Interdisciplinary dialogues (2018).