Journal article
Students' practices and abilities for writing from sources in English at universities in China
Alister Cumming, Luxin Yan, Chenhui Qiu, Lian Zhang, Xiaoling Ji, Junju Wang, Ying Wang, Ju Zhan, Fengjuan Zhang, Chunyan Xu, Rongping Cao, Lu Yu, Meng Chu, Meihua Liu, Min Cao, Conttia Lai
JOURNAL OF SECOND LANGUAGE WRITING | PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD | Published : 2018
Abstract
We surveyed the practices and abilities of 103 students at 4 universities in China to write from sources in English, documenting in their first and second years of Bachelors’ and Masters’ programs (longitudinally and cross-sectionally): (a) students’ self-reported approaches to writing from sources and instruction that had helped them; (b) the frequency, accuracy, and functions of citations in samples of their course papers; and (c) their abilities to summarize a reading passage under test-like conditions. The students wrote with some proficiency in English and emerging competencies in writing from academic sources, confirming, in this context where English is a foreign language, tendencies ..
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Funding Acknowledgements
Funding for this project is gratefully acknowledged from a Changjiang Scholarship from the Chinese Ministry of Education to the first author, from the resources of the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education at Beijing Foreign Studies University, and from funds from their home universities for each of the other researchers. We thank Ling Shi and the journal's reviewers and editors for many helpful suggestions on earlier drafts.