Teaching advanced English citation practices to students of specific disciplines: From investigation to materials design

What many EAP teachers might have experienced while teaching research writing to students of disciplines they are not trained in are the uncertainties about the citation practices followed in the disciplines of their students. Apart from the uncertainty revolving the choice of citation style (e.g., APA vs MLA), there are also those regarding the content of citing texts, their rhetorical purposes, their lengths and linguistic realizations of all these which are constrained by specific disciplinary cultures (see, e.g., Hyland, 2000). Unfortunately, empirically-informed instructional materials in these regards have always been lacking, and commercial sources tend to cover generic skills (e.g., paraphrasing, summarizing, and providing direct quotations) and syntactical rules that more often than not under-represent and sometimes reify the actual citation practices in specific fields. As an attempt to fill the gap in instructional literature, this paper describes a set of materials developed for a course on scholarly writing for doctoral students in a university in Hong Kong. It reports the process in which the materials were created, focusing on how the choice of target features of citation (e.g., functions of citation, reporting verbs, verb tenses, etc.) which form the aims of the unit has been made and in particular informed by empirical studies of citation (e.g., Thompson and Ye, 1991; Thompson and Hawes, 1999; Hyland, 1999, 2000; White, 2005; Tardy, 2006). It explains how students in the course were involved in the development of the materials, how the concordancing free-ware AntConc (Anthony, 2007) was used to analyze the target features, and how the results of analysis have been utilized in the design of the materials as well as a series of discovery tasks for classroom learning. It ends with a discussion of the students’ responses to the materials and their participation in the development.