Citation and Referencing Practices in Argumentative Essay Writing by Upper-Intermediate EFL Students

Abstract

One of the critical skills that undergraduate students of English as a Foreign language (EFL) should master involves their ability to write an argumentative essay, which is adequately supported by credible sources, such as scientific articles, books, and online materials. Arguably, a successful argumentative essay reflects EFL students’ genre-appropriate citation practices that, according to Swales (1990), involve several discursive realisations of citation (for instance, integral, non-integral, etc.) in the text. The article presents a study whose aim is to learn about citation and referencing practices in a corpus of argumentative essays written by a group of undergraduate EFL students on the upper-intermediate level of EFL proficiency (henceforth – participants). Anchored in the theoretical framework developed by Swales (1986, 1990), the participants’ citation and referencing practices in the corpus were identified and quantified. The results of the quantitative analysis revealed that the participants preferred the non-integral type of citation, where the author/authors cited are mentioned at the end of the citation in the parentheses. The participants’ referencing practices were found to be dominated by books and book chapters published by a number of reputable domestic publishing houses.