A Study Of The Features Of English Major Postgraduates’ Academic Writing Citation Behavior And Its Influencing Factors

Literature citation is a common rhetorical device and prominent feature of academic writing.It is an important indicator reflecting academic norms and writing quality.To some extent,it reflects the academic level and is crucial to ensuring the credibility of academic achievements.In the past two decades,more and more Western scholars have begun to pay attention to academic writing ability.The citation features in academic writing have become the research hot spots of experts and scholars in different fields.By comparing previous studies,it can be found that most of the previous studies focused on a single study of citation function and citation ability,lacking in-depth investigation of citation motivation and citation influence factors;most studies only using the method of text analysis lead to relatively simple research methods and categories;most of the research objects are the literature citations of researchers,experts and scholars and they are relatively scarce for students,especially postgraduate students.Therefore,this paper aims to study the features and current situation of citation behaviors of English major postgraduates,and to find out the influencing factors affecting their citation behavior.This study adopts a hybrid research design method that is mainly quantitative and supplemented by qualitative research,trying to study the following two questions:1.What are the features of citation behavior of English major postgraduate students?2.What are the citation motivations and influencing factors of English major postgraduate students? This thesis selects 30 course paper from second-year English major postgraduates who have had a semester of academic writing training as corpus.Informed by Hu Guangwei&Wang Guihua(2014)analytical framework,the corpus is encoded and annotated from four dimensions with regard to citation density,author integration,textual integration,and writer stance,and makes statistics with the help of SPSS software to obtain students’ citation behavior features.Then,through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews,the research data of citation motivation and its influencing factors were obtained.The questionnaire was adapted from Ma and Wu(2009)questionnaire.Semi-structured interviews were implementedaccording to the interview outline,mainly to understand students’ citation behaviors.The understanding of the features and the actual literature citation process,to obtain different factors affecting the citation behavior and citation motivation.The results of this thesis are as follows: First,the research on the behavioral features of citation can be found that in terms of the writer’s stance,all the students in the article use acknowledge and endorse citations and scant distance and contest citations.As for the textual integration: they cite an abundance of assimilation citations yet a paltry sum of insertion and insertion + assimilation citations.Regarding the type of citation: All subjects used integral citations more than non-integral citations.As for the motivations and influencing factors,the students’ citation motivation is mainly to meet the academic requirements.Most of the students start from thesis writing,and establish academic connections through citations to show respect for academic authority and achievements,but the self-academic identity is insufficiently constructed.The relevance,authority,accessibility and newness of the literature are the main factors affecting the selection and citation of the literature.The findings of this study unveil students’ shortcomings in citation competence so as to improve their citation use in academic writing.Meanwhile,it is also referable for teachers to improve their teaching plans when they are guiding students’ academic writing,thus helping students improve their citation competence.