Understanding Source Use by Undergraduate Post-Novice EFL Writers for the Sustainability Development of Academic Literacy: Abilities, Challenges, and Strategies

Source use by L2 writers is a significant topic of research in L2 writing. However, scant attention has been given to source use by undergraduate post-novice L2 writers. In contrast to undergraduate novice L2 writers who have just arrived at university and who often have little knowledge of source use and academic writing, undergraduate post-novice L2 writers are those who have achieved some proficiency in source use in academic writing assignments and have got some experience of writing from sources as they progress in their university studies (Keck, 2014; Wette, 2017). In this study, we examined source use by Chinese Year 3 undergraduate EFL writers through an analysis of their source use in essays and their perceptions of the challenges and strategies. The instances of source use in essays written by the students (N = 59) were analyzed in terms of source-use types, accuracy, and functions, which were then compared with those by novice and highly experienced writers in other studies. A subset of the students (N = 25) were interviewed to understand their perceptions of the challenges and the strategies in their source-based writing processes. The analysis of the students’ essays revealed that 71.4% of the instances of source use were paraphrases, and the majority of the instances of source use were of satisfactory quality, while a small portion were of poor quality, including exact copying (i.e., plagiarism), patchwriting, omitting references, or misrepresenting source information. The students used sources primarily to introduce or illustrate a point. An analysis of the interviews showed that the students had difficulty in searching for, understanding, and integrating sources and that they employed various strategies to cope with these challenges. This study enriches our understanding of undergraduate post-novice L2 writers’ abilities and the successive challenges when writing from sources, which has implications for the development of academic writing instruction and which will help students address these challenges and facilitate the sustainable development of their abilities to write from sources.