Beyond Forms and Manuals: A Sociocognitive Approach to Academic Citation in Novice EFL Researchers' Writing

As a prominent feature of academic discourse, citation is viewed as the ability to use sources effectively and appropriately and an essential skill that novice researchers must acquire [1]. However, due to novice researchers' insufficient disciplinary and linguistic competence and their unbalanced power relations to potential readers, appropriate citation may be hard to achieve, which is particularly true for L2 writers. The current study focuses on novice Chinese EFL researchers, the rapidly increasing population in the world academic arena but insufficiently studied so far. We report on emic, interview-based case study investigating three novice Chinese EFL researchers' accounts of their attitudes, motives and self-initiated strategies developed upon citations in academic writing for scholarly publication. A sociocognitive approach [2] [3] was adopted to investigate this perplexing issue. The results indicate that participants' citation practices can be better examined as a process influenced by the interplay of cognitive, physical and social factors in accordance with "mind, body and world" [4]. The study further suggests that pedagogy towards citation should move from one-sided rule-governed practice to the integration of social and cognitive dimensions.