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Citation Practices in EFL Undergraduate Theses: A Focus on Reporting Verbs Katalin Doró University of Szeged, Hungary
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dorokati@lit.u-szeged.hu Introduction
Writing academic texts is an important part of the professional life of academics. This means that the widely held “publish or perish” attitude puts great pressure on scholars to disseminate their research projects and ideas. I am of the opinion that a similar type of pressure is placed on students who are required to write seminar papers and home assignments throughout their studies and a thesis before graduating. The “publish or perish” attitude in their case can be translated into a “write or receive no credit” view. The pressure is enormous since many of them are not equipped with the content knowledge, academic writing skills, and often even the language skills necessary to construct meaningful and acceptable texts. In addition, they often finish their papers in a great hurry, against the ticking clock. A few semesters of writing instruction provide valuable help in how to write academic texts, and students also implicitly learn about it while reading scholarly works; yet many struggle with writing assignments both in their mother tongue (L1) and in the target language (L2), English. When undergraduates are asked to write summaries, literature reviews, analyses of sources, or to carry out and report on small-scale empirical research, they have to simultaneously attend to issues that require constant decision-making, such as methods and text construction questions, grammatical and lexical choices, and citation and paraphrasing problems. Appropriate referencing to the works of others is a major prerequisite of most academic writing genres, but it often proves to be very challenging to novice writers. The inappropriate phrasing of citations can lead to misunderstanding, unclear authorial stance, or even charges of plagiarism. The aim of the present study is to investigate the citation practices found in BA level theses, with focus on the reporting verbs or verb phrases in finite reporting clauses with that-clause complementation, as in the following example: Hyland (2010) reported that. This author + reporting verb phrase + that-clause format is a frequently employed rhetorical device to indicate the findings of other authors and is probably the most difficult citation type since it requires the paraphrasing of the
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