Teaching English for Academic Writing: Citation Analysis Enhancing Intercultural Paradigm

Abstract

Teaching English for Scientific Purposes to Master students should start with understanding a number of issues including self-citation and self-plagiarism. Any type of citation analysis in the beginning of the Academic Writing Course demonstrates a mass of direct quotations from the sources used as a background for the research paper and students’ inability to embed quotations into the text via paraphrasing or appropriate in-text citation. Gradually, students’ reading for the research writing enhances, and the citation analysis of the papers shows a growth of students’ awareness and steadily moves towards the intercultural issues and students’ research potential development. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses allow to conclude that students’ Academic English acquisition is directly related to the number of borrowings with or without references to the source. Thus, discussions of the plagiarism cases increase students’ awareness of the problem. Methodology used for the analysis includes direct analysis of the first- and second-year Master students’ papers. Quantitative as well as qualitative analyses should reflect gradually growing students’ awareness of the issues. The prevailing number of borrowings without proper referencing to the source text at the beginning and an increasing number of in-text citations to the end of the studying process indicate the slow shift in the intercultural paradigm acquired via reading and analysing a number of the research papers in English both to extend students’ scientific discourse background and enhance the command of academic/scientific English.KeywordsAcademic writingCitation analysisDiscourseEnglish for specific purposesUniversity curriculum