Emerging disciplinary voices

Abstract

While referencing is an important feature of academic writing, many students struggle with using sources. This struggle seems to be due, in part, to the tension students experience when advised to cite sources (i.e., others’ voices) on the one hand, and to demonstrate their own disciplinary voice on the other hand. The aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of source use, presenting a figure that illustrates gradients of students’ engagement with sources in various sections of their bachelor’s theses. Based on Bakhtin’s idea that a writer’s voice gradually emerges out of others’ words, and the terms knowledge telling and knowledge transforming, we developed a continuum that might help to understand the complexity of source use. We arrived at this continuum through the qualitative exploration of students’ use of sources in 15 bachelor’s theses from the humanities in one Norwegian university. In this article, we illustrate the continuum through extracts from the students’ theses, showing how issues of voice are intertwined with students’ engagement with sources. We propose that understanding the various functions of sources as they are typically used in the disciplines will help students to develop and demonstrate their disciplinary voices. Moreover, the continuum provides a foundation for fruitful discussions of writing practices that raise critical awareness about implicit expectations concerning source use and issues of voice in academic writing.