On some reformulation markers in masters dissertations written in Romanian as a mother tongue and in French as a foreign language

The theoretical chapter of masters dissertations written by master's students represents a real challenge for them because the techniques of academic writing presuppose judicious understanding and reformulation of the sources consulted. In this article, based on a corpus of 30 masters dissertations written in Romanian mother tongue and in French as a foreign language in the broad domain of philology, we examine the types of reformulation as well as the markers of reformulation used by novice writers. The analysis shows that the qualitative and quantitative differences between the reformulation markers used in the mother tongue and in the foreign language are related to the students' reading and writing practices in the two languages.