Towards a pedagogy to help postgraduate students avoid plagiarism in English academic writing in the EFL context

Author(s):  
Thi Van Lam Nguyen
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 527-542
Author(s):  
Noof Saleh Alharbi

This current research forms part of a broader investigation into the problems Saudi postgraduate students face in English academic writing. The study used the interpretive paradigm to investigate and interpret the perceptions of Saudi postgraduate students and their supervisors in relation to the difficulties they encountered regarding academic writing in English. Therefore, the study adopted a sequential mixed-methods design. The quantitative phase of the research employed a questionnaire whereas the qualitative phase employed semi-structured interviews and document analysis. In total, 275 students completed the prepared questionnaire whilst 15 students, both male and female, and 9 supervisors participated in the semi-structured interviews. The research also used ten samples of written feedback students had received from their supervisors. SPSS descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data quantitatively, and MAXQDA software was used to analyse the data qualitatively. The study identified that Saudi postgraduates encounter a range of difficulties in their academic writing, which were due to several underlying causes. Therefore, to address this issue and to contribute to knowledge in the field, the author of this study devised a theoretical model to assist Saudi postgraduate students overcome their difficulties with English academic writing. The main focus of the current study is to explain this model in detail.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noof Saleh Alharbi

This current research forms part of a broader investigation into the problems Saudi postgraduate students face in English academic writing. The study used the interpretive paradigm to investigate and interpret the perceptions of Saudi postgraduate students and their supervisors in relation to the difficulties they encountered regarding academic writing in English. Therefore, the study adopted a sequential mixed-methods design. The quantitative phase of the research employed a questionnaire whereas the qualitative phase employed semi-structured interviews and document analysis. In total, 275 students completed the prepared questionnaire whilst 15 students, both male and female, and 9 supervisors participated in the semi-structured interviews. The research also used ten samples of written feedback students had received from their supervisors. SPSS descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data quantitatively, and MAXQDA software was used to analyse the data qualitatively. The study identified that Saudi postgraduates encounter a range of difficulties in their academic writing, which were due to several underlying causes. Therefore, to address this issue and to contribute to knowledge in the field, the author of this study devised a theoretical model to assist Saudi postgraduate students overcome their difficulties with English academic writing. The main focus of the current study is to explain this model in detail.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 371
Author(s):  
Abdulwahid Qasem Al Zumor

Whether the postgraduate students in the EFL context are adequately trained to express their authorial voice in academic writing in an appropriate tone has not been clarified enough in the literature. The aim of this study is to explore the linguistic resources used by Saudi postgraduate students of Applied Linguistics to construct stance when they write critique essays. To achieve this goal, a corpus of 78000 words was built from 73 critique essays collected in five years. To analyze this corpus, LancsBox corpus analysis software was used to generate the concordances with frequencies of key words in context. The model of corpus analysis used was Hyland’s (2005) which views stance as a construct within a model of interaction in academic discourse that comprises boosters, hedges, attitude markers, and self-mentions. The major findings of the study showed that the most frequently used stance markers were hedges, followed by attitude markers, then boosters, and finally self-mentions. In addition, the linguistic resources used in these strategies of stance construction by the students in this particular context need to be enhanced in order to conform with conventional standards of academic writing. To meet this ambitious requirement, the study recommends explicit instruction, training, and showcasing these textual resources as they occur in high quality discipline-specific publications.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ziou Huang ◽  
Hui Yu

Abstract As a significant indicator of College students’ ability in academic English communication, academic papers, especially their condensed abstracts require various writing techniques among which the use of grammatical metaphors (GMs) is typical. To improve the English academic writing level of Chinese postgraduate students, it is significant to compare their use of GMs with that in expert research articles. On the basis of Halliday’s reclassification of GMs, this study aims to compare the characteristics of GMs in abstracts of MA theses and expert research articles (RAs). It is found that there is universal use of nearly all GM types in both groups. The two groups are similar in that they share the top five most frequently used GMs, and there are no significant differences in the use of more than half of the GM types. However, the overall GM frequency of expert RAs is significantly higher than that of MA theses. Significant differences are also found in the use of six GM types. Furthermore, some correlations between certain GM types found in expert RAs are missing in MA theses. Reasons for these differences may include the limited understanding of GM, the underdeveloped cognitive ability, the genre differences and the first language differences. Based on these findings, implications for teaching and learning are discussed.


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