Citations, reformulations du discours d’autrui : une clé pour enseigner l’écriture de recherche ?

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Many students experience considerable difficulty in integrating other people''s sayings and writings into their research reports. In other terms, they often fail to do justice to the polyphony characteristic of this type of discourse. Several students'' writing assignments will be examined to seek an answer to the following questions : What relationship can be observed between the information-gathering phase and the eventual end-product by observing the intermediary stages ? What type of information do the students favour, and how do they employ it to approach the theme of their research ? What form are the elements eventually retained given in their own writing ? Along a continuum ranging from straight quotation to reformulation of other people''s writings, one may observe how the students''insufficient mastery of the skills required by this type of discourse may trigger characteristic errors : excessive quotation, unacknowledged reproduction or paraphrase, hasty generalization, and failure to reproduce the modalities present in the originals quoted. Moreover, it can be observed that students have difficulty defining their own position with regard to the authors they quote ; this, in turn, may reflect a problematic relashionship with «authority » and knowledge in general. The didactic proposals based on these observations seek to highlight how developing awareness of the characteristic discourse features of this kind of writing may, by the same token, offer insight into the procedures and the philosophy of research in the students'' respective disciplines.