-
occlusion is extended here to refer to the features of academic
texts which are not ordinarily
rights reserved.
* Tel.: +46 21 151702.E-mail address: [email protected].
www.elsevier.com/locate/esp
English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429
ENGLISH FORSPECIFICPURPOSES0889-4906/$30.00 2005 The American
University. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Allvisible to the reader.
One important area of occlusion is citation and, specically, the
relation-ship between a reference to a source and the source
itself. This article reports the ndings of aninvestigation into
three visible and occluded features of postgraduate second-language
writing.The novice writers in this study were found to respond to
their disciplines expectations interms of the visible aspects of
source use, but with regard to the occluded features their
writingdiverged considerably from received disciplinary norms. The
ndings also suggest that, withrespect to disciplinary norms, a gap
may exist between what is prescribed and what ispracticed. 2005 The
American University. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights
reserved.Visible and occluded citation featuresin postgraduate
second-language writing
Diane Pecorari *
Department of Humanities, Malardalen University, 72123 Vasteras,
Sweden
Abstract
As novice members of their academic discourse communities,
postgraduates face the chal-lenge of learning to write in ways
which will be judged as appropriate by those communities.Two
resources in this eort are students own observations of the
features of published texts intheir disciplines, and feedback on
their texts from teachers and advisors. These resourcesdepend,
though, on the extent to which textual features can be observed.
Swales [Swales, J.M. (1996). Occluded genres in the academy: The
case of the submission letter. In E. Ventola& A. Mauranen
(Eds.). Academic writing: intercultural and textual issues (pp.
4558). Amster-dam: John Benjamins.] has noted the existence of
occluded academic genres. The notion
ofdoi:10.1016/j.esp.2005.04.004
-
have& Trcharatice, wthe skice calearnmutuin the
D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429
5dentadvisor pairs, the only relationship which could be described
as an unqualiedsuccess was one which was characterized by a high
degree of collaborative involve-ment between the student and the
advisor in the activities of thesis research.
Other accounts of postgraduateadvisor interaction (e.g., Acker,
Hill, & Black,1994; Luebs, Fredrickson, Hyon, & Samraj,
1998; Prior, 1998) illustrate an aspectof the relationship which
may easily be taken for granted: its ad hoc nature.
Whileclassroom-based learning is generally driven by a syllabus or
set of learning objec-tives which more or less systematically
address the areas the teacher believes to beimportant, a common
mode of interaction between students and thesis advisors isfor the
student to present his or her recent eorts (reports on research,
proposals,draft chapters, etc.) for the advisors feedback. In this
pattern of interaction, it is
the sttermed legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) (by,
e.g., Belcher, 1994; Becherowler, 2001; Berkenkotter & Huckin,
1995; Prior, 1998; Swales, 1998). LPP iscterized by novices
involvement in the authentic tasks of a community of prac-hile in
close contact with an established member of that community, so
thatilled practitioner can observe and assess the novices
performance, and the nov-n observe and learn from the
practitioners. While Lave and Wengers model ofing is, as Swales
rightly notes, a rather idealized one (Swales, 1998, p. 203), theal
engagement, active participation and observation which feature
prominentlymodel are likely to be benecial. In Belchers (1994)
study of three Ph.D. stu-1. Introduction
Writing is a key academic activity, and a crucial one for
postgraduates, for whomwriting is simultaneously the most prominent
learning activity and the normal mech-anism by which they are
assessed and awarded admission to their disciplinary dis-course
communities. Learning to write appropriate texts is, therefore, an
essentialcomponent of academic success. What constitutes an
appropriate text, however, isdetermined not only by general
standards of good writing, but by the specic de-mands and
constraints of the writers disciplinary community. Thus, learning
towrite entails becoming an individual suciently versed in the ways
of the academiccommunity to understand what makes a text
appropriate. Or as Hyland puts it:
Learning to write academic genres. . . does, of course, involve
students contend-ing with issues of form and structure, and with
public contexts for writing. Tobe successful, however, it must also
involve them in acquiring a metacognitiveawareness of these forms
and contexts and a familiarity with the discoursalstrategies they
need to perform roles, engage in interactions, and accomplishgoals
in the target community. In sum, it requires that students gain an
aware-ness of the disciplines symbolic resources for getting things
done by routinelyconnecting purposes with features of texts
(Hyland, 2000, p. 145).
How novice academic writers gain this awareness has been the
subject of consider-able discussion and investigation, and two
suggestive themes have emerged from ac-counts of studentadvisor
relationships. First, parallels with apprenticeship havebeen drawn,
and in particular with the mode of learning Lave and Wenger
(1991)udents work which triggers comments from the advisor and
therefore to some
-
6 D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429extent
sets the agenda for feedback. This, naturally enough, means that
the advisorresponds to those positive and negative features of the
text which are seen to meritcomment.
However, not all components of a text, nor all texts, are
equally conspicuous.Swales (1996) has noted the existence of
genres, such as job applications or lettersaccompanying an article
submission, which are typically hidden, out of sight oroccluded
from the public gaze (p. 46). These genres are especially likely to
be oc-cluded for a novice researcher, who typically has fewer
opportunities to perform theactivities which render them visible
(e.g., editing a scholarly journal, reviewing appli-cations). At
the same time, novices frequently need to produce such texts, often
aspart of genre chains (Swales, 2004, pp. 1819). For example,
publishing a researcharticle (a public genre) involves producing
ancillary texts such as a submission letterand responses to
reviewers comments (occluded genres).
The realization that novice writers need to produce texts of a
type they rarely seemodeled has sparked a growing awareness that
the occluded academic genres shouldbe taught explicitly (Belcher,
2004, pp. 168169; Swales, 1997, pp. 380381), an eortwhich is
facilitated by increasing attention to these genres in textbooks
(Swales &Feak, 2000, 2004) and the research literature (e.g.,
Aguilar, 2004; Gosden, 2003;Hyon & Chen, 2004).
However, less attention has been given to the fact that within
visible, public genresthere exist features which are occluded
(Pecorari, 2003). One example of occludedfeatures can be found in
citations. While citations themselves are quite visible,
someaspects of what they signal are less so. For example, the
reader of a new text cannot,merely by reading the citing text,
ordinarily know whether an idea, fact, etc. attrib-uted to the
earlier text is reported accurately. The relationship between the
two textsis, therefore occluded.
Because citation involves a referenceand often a minimal oneto
somethingexternal to the citing text, it is especially susceptible
to occlusion. Indeed, the accep-tance of some occlusion is implicit
in the existence of conventions for citation. Theact of citing an
earlier source creates a relationship between the citing and the
citedtexts. The writer cannot, however, assume a reader with a
suciently detailed knowl-edge of all the cited texts to be able to
diagnose the nature of that relationship. Theconventional signals
for source reporting are needed, therefore, to allow the writer
toreveal as much of the relationship as she or he thinks the reader
needs to know. Atthe same time the writer makes a tacit promise
that the relationship is one which isappropriate in the discourse
community. Quotation marks, for example, not onlysignal words
repeated from a prior text, they promise the reader that the
wordsare repeated accurately, that they have not been taken out of
context, that they comefrom the work of the author who is named,
and so on.
Whether this promise is kept depends on the writers skill (i.e.,
the ability to carryout the rhetorical task of reporting sources
transparently), on the writers integrity,and on the writers
expertise as a judge of what is acceptable within the
discoursecommunity. In the case of postgraduates, however,
expertise cannot be taken forgranted. By virtue of their status as
students, it is accepted that their skills are in
a developmental state (hence the need for advisors to evaluate
and guide their work).
-
If that evaluation occurs on an ad hoc basis, though, there is
reason to wonderwhether the occluded features will receive the
attention they deserve.1
The conjunction of occluded textual features and ad hoc advising
raises a numberof questions: as novice academic writers learn to
write in their disciplinary discoursecommunities, do they perform
as satisfactorily on occluded textual features as on vis-ible ones?
Is feedback from supervisors directed where it is needed, or
primarily atthe visible features of a text? And, most importantly,
do novice writers gain sucientskill in, and knowledge about, how
they should perform academic writing in their
samples (in the case of the supervisors) in this project. So
that the interviews couldbe conducted during the period of active
writing, the masters students were asked to
D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429 7supply
drafts of material which they anticipated would later be included
in their dis-sertations.2 All complied, except for the two
engineering students, who wrote no pre-liminary drafts prior to
completing and submitting their dissertations. Although itcannot be
known how representative this relatively small number of students
canbe said to be of postgraduate second-language writers, there is
no reason to believe
1 Swales (1996) posits the relationship between novice status
and occlusion as a loose one; access to theoccluded genres is
likely to come with greater experience. In addition, the
distinction between novice andexpert (or Junior and Senior
Researchers, in Swales terms) is not a binary one but rather one of
degree(Swales, 2004, pp. 5657). This paper does not aim to explore
fully the concept of occlusion (a pervasivefeature of language use
which is by no means restricted to novices participation in a
discoursecommunity), but rather examines occlusion in one site.2
The terms thesis and dissertation are used dierently around the
world. Here, the usage of the
students institutions will be adopted: the masters students
wrote dissertations and the Ph.D. studentsdisciplines, during their
postgraduate apprenticeships? The investigation reportedhere
addressed these questions through an analysis of the source use in
the writingof 17 postgraduate students in four academic
disciplines. The texts were found tobe quite successful with regard
to visible aspects of source use; however, the picturethat emerged
of the occluded features was rather dierent.
2. Methods
The texts that made up the research corpus were written by nine
masters studentsand 8 Ph.D. students at three British universities,
all of whom were non-nativespeakers of English (NNSEs). To balance
the competing needs of providing as muchcontext as possible for the
writing samples and protecting the writers privacy, thetwo
subcorpora were gathered in dierent ways. In the case of the
masters subcor-pus, lecturers were contacted to ask whether they
and their students would be willingto take part in what was
described in general terms as a study of academic writing.This
resulted in nine students completing the study: two each in
biology, civil engi-neering, and education, and three in
linguistics. None of the students or the super-visors were known to
me before I solicited their involvement in the project. Thenine
students and their supervisors agreed to take part in interviews,
and to theuse of their writing (in the case of the students) or
their comments on the writingwrote theses. Supervisor and advisor
will be used interchangeably.
-
8 D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429that
they diered substantially from their peers in any respect which
might inuencethese ndings, apart from, perhaps, their willingness
to participate in this study,which might tentatively be interpreted
as speaking to a degree of commitment toand interest in writing
well.
For the reasons detailed above, the masters writing samples were
in draft form. Inorder to include some nal-draft writing in the
corpus, the Ph.D. subcorpus was com-posed of samples from completed
Ph.D. theses taken from the shelves of the studentsuniversity
libraries. No contact was made with the students or their
supervisors. Selec-
Table 1Composition of the corpus by eld and level of study
Writing sample Masters dissertations (draft) Ph.D. theses
(completed)
Writer Length (number of words) Writer Length (number of
words)
Science Ingrid 2136 Sci1 2871Erden 1373 Sci2 2805
Engineering Yves 2240 Eng1 3261Pierre 5025 Eng2 3237
Social science Graciela 4227 SS1 2314Maria 3651 SS2 2665
Humanities Roula 2430 H1 3439Kwan 2797 H2 3474Helen 3510
Total number of words 51,455
Average number of words per writing sample 3027tions of
approximately equal length were selected from the early chapters of
eight the-ses, two each from the four disciplines represented in
the masters subcorpus. In all,the corpus contained over 51,000
words with each writing sample averaging just over3000. Table 1
gives details of the composition of the corpus. (To insure the
anonymityof the writers, the names of the masters students have
been changed and the names ofthe writers departments and
universities are not given.)
The focus of this investigation was the visible and occluded use
of sources andcitation in the student writing samples. Three
aspects of source use proved to be rel-evant to the question of
occlusion: (1) secondary citation; (2) the nature of thesources
used and reported; and (3) language repeated from the source.
Investigatingthese three areas involved rst establishing what the
expectations of the writers dis-ciplinary discourse communities
were likely to be; then examining the visible por-tions of the
texts; and, nally, examining the occluded aspects.
2.1. Establishing disciplinary expectations
A range of sources was used to shed light on what appropriate
means in thecontexts of the disciplines considered here. A large
body of the literature has ad-dressed writing within academic
disciplines (e.g., Becher & Trowler, 2001; Charles,
-
2003; Hyland, 2000; Shaw, 1992, 2003; Swales, 1990, 1998, among
many others).Interviews with the writers and their supervisors, the
observation of similaritiesand dierences within and across
disciplines in the corpus itself, and widely acceptedprinciples of
source use also informed the question of appropriateness.
Secondary citation refers to a report of a source based not on
the source itself, butupon an account of it from another, later
text. The MLA Style Manual and Guide to
D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429
9Scholarly Writing expresses a preference for avoiding this form of
citation: When-ever you can, take material from the original
source, not a secondhand one (Gibaldi,1998, p. 245). The
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Associationconcurs
that it is preferable to read and cite primary sources whenever
possible(American Psychological Association, 2001, p. 245). Both
manuals agree that whensources are used at second hand, the
citation should make that clear, and on thatpoint there is likely
to be widespread agreement.
The types of sources cited in an academic text are necessarily
constrained by thetopic and therefore by the discipline in which
the text is produced. Bechers usefulidentication of urban and rural
elds helps explain the preference of certaindisciplines for certain
types of sources. Urban elds resemble big-city life in that theyare
characterized by a densely concentrated population[,] a generally
busyocca-sionally freneticpace of life, a high level of collective
activity, close competitionfor space and resources, and a rapid and
heavily used information network whilethe opposite is generally
true of a rural eld (Becher & Trowler, 2001, p. 106). Urbanelds
tend to be in the sciences,3 while the soft disciplines and the
hard, applied ones,are often rural in nature (Becher & Trowler,
2001, p. 108). The areas represented inthe present study bear this
out; the scientists alone could be said to participate in anurban
research environment.
Rural elds tend to favor book publications, while in urban elds
the journal arti-cle dominates (Becher & Trowler, 2001, p.
110). Citing discussion by Whitley (1984)and by Grith and Small
(1983), Becher and Trowler (2001) discuss this preferencelargely in
terms of the extent to which topics require explanation and
elaboration.Where detailed accounts of complex procedures and close
reasoning are needed, ajournal article may not oer sucient space to
address the topic.
Clearly the nature of a research project determines the amount
of space needed todescribe it, as illustrated by the fact that
articles in technical elds are frequently un-der ten pages in
length, while in the social sciences they can easily be more than
dou-ble that. However, speed is likely also to be a consideration,
since the fast pace ofurban elds puts a premium on rapid
publication. Journal publication lends itselfto speed, and some
journals are especially responsive to the need to disseminate
nd-ings quickly. For example, the Lancet is published weekly, and
oers an accelerated
3 Naturally, these broad classications, like all
generalizations, apply better to some members of thegroup than
others. The scientists in the present study were in a branch of
plant biology which greatlyresembles an urban eld as described
above. On the other hand, for the botanists whose working
practicesare described by Swales (1998) there are more research
topics than researchers to do the work, and thelifetime of a
project can extend beyond the lifetime of the researcher. Swales
botanists are, therefore, at the
extreme end of the rural scale.
-
refereeing process which can result in an article appearing in
print within four weeksof it being submitted. The prestigious
Science4 publishes some papers electronicallybefore they appear in
a paper edition. This dierential need for rapid publication
isconrmed by the broad range in time from submission to
publication, which can be
10 D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429as
little as three months or as long as three years, depending on the
eld (Becher &Trowler, 2001, p. 112). So while there is likely
to be considerable overlap among thedisciplines with regard to type
of source cited, the (urban) scientists would be ex-pected to show
a preference for journal articles, especially newer ones, and the
other(rural) elds to cite a wider range of sources, including books
and older sources.
With regard to language repeated from sources, disciplinary
dierences are moreclear cut. Quotationthe repetition of language
from a source, made evident by theuse of quotation marks or another
typographical devicecomprises a signicantminority of citations in
the soft disciplines, but is vanishingly rare in hard elds.5
One of the biology supervisors conrmed this, commenting . . .it
just wouldnt hap-pen in a masters or Ph.D. thesis, you just wouldnt
expect to see it, and I dont thinkI ever have. This dierence may be
dictated by the epistemological demands of hardand soft elds. If a
knowledge claim is based on objective fact, any accurate render-ing
of that fact is as good as any other. Where subjective claims are
at stake (as theyoften are in soft elds) especially great care may
be needed to give a nuanced render-ing, making claims neither
stronger nor weaker than the original author intended.Explicit
quotation can be one strategy for accomplishing this.
Regardless of discipline, language repeated from a source should
appear withinquotation marks, or in narrower margins (in the case
of longer quotations), orshould otherwise be marked as coming from
another source. The principle that quo-tation, when it used, must
be signaled, is thought to be widely accepted across dis-ciplines,
and the fact that university disciplinary policies uniformly
categorizeunsignaled repetition as plagiarism (Pecorari, 2001)
suggests that no need is per-ceived to specify exceptions for
particular disciplines.
It is noteworthy that arriving at the above description of best
practice in sourceuse entails drawing on sources as disparate as
prescriptive writing guides, descriptiveaccounts of academic texts,
and reports from individual informants. This highlightsthe fact
that expectations for writing within the disciplines have been
codied un-evenly, leaving many lacunae. For example, the MLA and
APA guides oer ne-grained descriptions of scholarly writing
practices, and are widely accepted asauthoritative within the
humanities and social sciences, respectively. However, writ-ers in
the sciences and engineering lack a similarly detailed guide.
The scarcity of comprehensive standards has two practical
implications for thepresent research. First, it enhances the role
of existing texts as models. Second, thereis likely to be some
disagreementperhaps considerable disagreementabout gen-eral
principles and how to apply them in practice. From the point of
view of the nov-
4 Information for authors on
http://www.thelancet.com/info/info?n1=authorinfo&n2=fast+track
andhttp://www.sciencemag.org/feature/contribinfo/prep/gen_info.shtml#express,
respectively, both accessed9 August 2004.
5 Swales (2004, p. 139) notes that psychology and economics also
make sparing use of quotation.
-
D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429 11ice
attempting to enter the discourse community this is unfortunate, as
the likely con-cern of such a writer will be not only to produce
texts which are acceptable to inu-ential individual readers such as
advisors and examiners, but also to the disciplinarydiscourse
community generally.
2.2. Examining the visible features
Because of the highly conventional nature of citation in
academic writing, identi-fying the visible manifestations of source
use in the student writing samples wasstraightforward. Secondary
citation was identied where it was signaled by meansof the
conventional Smith, as cited in Jones, or by a similar device. For
example,although Roulas citation in (1), is not in precisely the
form advocated by writingmanuals, the mention of Hegel immediately
followed by a citation to Cooper spellsout clearly that Hegel was
not a primary source.
(1) Hegel regarded a dead metaphor as one that has lost its
power to call up ideaswhich the words once expressed (Cooper, 1986,
p. 24). [Roula 6:1e]
The type of publication cited, and the year in which it was
published, were alsoevident in most cases from the citation and
reference list (although 44, or nearly10%, of the sources cited
could not reliably be classied according to type, most of-ten
because entries in the reference list were missing or incomplete,
particularlyamong the (draft) dissertation writing samples).
Similarly, quotation could be iden-tied by the presence of
quotation marks, the use of narrower margins for longerquotations
or, rarely, some other explicit textual device.
2.3. Examining the occluded features
By contrast, the very nature of occluded features meant that
identifying them wasmore complex and involved a certain amount of
inference. Investigating the oc-cluded citation features entailed
examining not only the 17 writing samples butthe sources they
cited. Altogether the student texts used and/or referred to
481sources. Of these, 363, or three-quarters, were obtained.
Portions of the student-writ-ten texts, accounting for nearly
31,000 words, or 60% of the corpus, were then com-pared to the
sources to establish the relationship between each source and
thewriters representation of it. Some parts of the student texts
could not be compared,for one of a number of reasons, including the
absence of a citation, presumably indi-cating that the passage in
question was original to the writer, or the unavailability ofthe
cited source.
In order to assess whether occlusion was involved in the rst two
areassecond-ary citation and the nature of the source usedit was
necessary to determinewhether the source cited was the one actually
used at a given point in the studenttext. This was done primarily
on the basis of a degree of similarity between a portionof the
student writing sample and another text which indicated that the
latter was
likely to be the source for the former, as in example (2).
-
Example (2a) comes from a student writing sample, (b) comes from
Berg (1987), asource cited elsewhere by the student but not in this
section of the text, and (c) comesfrom Deese (1984), the source
cited by the student (here and elsewhere, the origin ofexamples is
given in square brackets and italics, underlining indicates
language incommon between the student text and its source, and bold
type indicates languagein common between two sources).
(2a) Deese 1984 does not nd a single example of a genuine
spoonerism in his tape-
12 D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006)
429recorded English corpus and thinks that exchange is rarer than
commonly sup-posed (p. 17). [H1 26:2g]
(2b) In his tape-recorded English corpus, Deese 1984 does not nd
a single exampleof a genuine spoonerism and concludes that this
error category is much rarerthan we commonly suppose (Deese, 1984,
p. 118). [(Berg, 1987, pp. 2829)]
(2c) Notice that there are, with one possible exception, no
completed spoonerisms.Neighboring speech sounds (with, as Lashley
and others have observed, antic-ipation being the norm) are often
the source of mispronounced words, but Isuspect that the complete
reversals for spoonerisms are much rarer than wecommonly suppose.
[Deese, 1984, p. 118]
The strong similarity between (2a) and (2b) forms the basis for
the conclusion thatH1 has cited Deese at second hand, through Berg.
The H1 passage can be subdividedinto three strings, (1) Deese
(1984) does not nd a single example of a genuine spoo-nerism; (2)
in his tape-recorded English corpus; and (3) thinks that exchange
is rarerthan commonly supposed (p. 17). The rst two strings appear
in identical form inBerg, although reversed. The third string is
not identical but shows great similarityto Berg, as Table 2
illustrates.
The third string diers from Berg in six respects: (1) the choice
of reporting verb;(2) exchange in place of this error category
(exchange was the error categoryintended by Berg); (3) Berg retains
much in the quotation from Deese, while H1omits it; (4) Berg
retains we suppose from Deese, while the student gives it inthe
passive; (5) Berg signals six words as quotation, while H1 does
not, perhaps be-cause of the last two changes; and (6) in the nal
citation, Berg repeats Deese 1984as well as the page number, while
H1 gives only the page number (note the discrep-ancy; Bergs
reference is correct). In spite of these dierences, the underlying
similar-ity of structure suggests that H1s string can be viewed as
a modied version ofBergs.
Table 2Partial comparison of H1 and Berg (note that Bergs
commonly appears out of order for ease ofcomparison)
H1 and thinks that exchange is rarer than commonly supposed (p.
17)Berg and concludes that this error
categoryis much rarer than commonly we suppose (Deese 1984,
p. 118)
-
This interpretation is supported by the fact that the similarity
between H1 andBerg is greater than the similarity of either passage
to Deese. Apart from the stringin Table 2, only the word spoonerism
occurs in all three passages. The dierencesbetween (2a/b) and (2c)
fall into two categories. First, Berg and H1 are more concisethan
Deese: the qualication with one possible exception is omitted, as
is the dis-cussion of interactions with neighboring speech sounds.
These two omissions arehardly conclusive, since both involve
propositions ancillary to Deeses main point;
D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429 13they
are, therefore, precisely the sort of detail that would tend to be
left out of a ref-erence to this point in Deeses book. More
signicant is the reference in (2a) and (2b)to the absence of
genuine spoonerisms; Deese has completed spoonerisms,
contrastingthem with aborted spoonerisms (Deese, 1984, pp. 118119),
in which speakers be-gin exchange errors and then interrupt and
correct themselves. Genuine is not anobvious paraphrasing choice;
its presence in both H1 and Berg is yet another simi-larity which,
taken with those described above, suggests that the H1 and Berg
word-ings indicate unacknowledged secondary citation.
Two caveats should be noted, though. First, however likely it is
that Berg was thesource of H1s account of Deeseand I have argued
that it is likely indeedit re-mains an inference. The theoretical
possibility can never be entirely eliminated thatthe similarity is
a result of coincidence, regardless of the degree of similarity
betweentwo texts.6 Second, the conclusion that H1 reported Deeses
work through Bergs ac-count of it does not preclude the possibility
that H1 also read Deese. That would not,however, mitigate the
potential consequences of adding an additional link to thechain of
reporting. Those consequences will be illustrated below.
Establishing occludedi.e., unsignaledrepetition of language
involved compar-ing passages from the student texts with their
sources. The conventions used for iden-tifying shared words
included the following: words were counted if they were
spelleddierently as a result of typographical error or dierent
spelling conventions, or ifthey were inected dierently for tense or
number, but not if they appeared in twotexts as dierent word
classes. Thus (invented examples), (3a) and (3b) are consideredto
share dramatic, change(s), have/has, been and reali(z/s)ed, but not
recent/recently.
(3a) In recent years, dramatic changes have been realized.(3b)
Recently, a dramatic change has been realised.
Important to note is that this comparison did not count all the
words shared byentire texts, but only those in contextually related
sections. So, for example, spooner-ism in (2a), is counted as being
present in both texts, not only because the word occurs
6 Nor could the writer settle the question conclusively, since a
writers memory, awareness of the writingprocess and candour would
always be open to question. Coincidence, though, is an
implausibleexplanation for cases like example 2. The shorter of the
two strings shared by H1 and Berg is in his tape-recorded English
corpus. Corpus alone turns up 6,450,000 hits on Google, while the
phrase Englishcorpus turns up 23,800, and no hits are generated for
tape-recorded English corpus. This hints at thescope of the
coincidence involved in the longer of the two strings being
re-created independently of Berg,
and then all three strings co-occurring.
-
blin, 1981, cited in Megahy, 1998, p. 28). [Graciela 3:4b]
14 D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006)
429However, the comparison of the student texts with their sources
shows that thissupercial appearance of compliance with common
practice is misleading. A muchlarger number of citations appear to
have been included through a secondary source,without
acknowledgement, as in example (5). Although the student text in
(5a) refersonly to Bjerrum at this point, a source acknowledged
elsewhere in the writing samplereports the same point from Bjerrum,
in similar language, suggesting that studentin both but because it
occurs in the repeated phrase does not nd a single example ofa
genuine spoonerism, and because (2a) and (2b) address the same
topic in a similarway. Finally, all sources used for comparison
were included in reference lists or other-wise identied by the
writers, although not always in proximity to the part of the
textunder comparison. It is possible that entirely uncited texts
may have been used insome or all of the writing samples.
3. Visible and occluded source use in the writing samples
The preceding section described conventional and expected
features of source usein four disciplines. The extent to which the
texts in this corpus match the abovedescription can be taken as an
indication of the writers success both in understand-ing what their
disciplines expect of them, and in meeting those expectations.
Withrespect to the visible features, the writers performance was
very much in line withexpectations; the use of acknowledged
secondary citation, the nature of the sourcescited, and the
signaling of quotation, fell within the bounds described.
However,when the occluded elements were examined, a dierent picture
emerged.
3.1. Secondary citation
Secondary citation, as noted above, is generally less desirable
than a reference tothe primary source, and should be signaled
clearly when used. An examination of thecitations in this corpus
indicate limited use of secondary citation. Altogether 858
in-stances of a source being mentioned occur in the corpus. (To
arrive at this gure,repeated mentions of the same source were
counted separately, as were multipleworks referred to in a single
citation.) As Fig. 1 shows, only 17 of the 858 sourcementions
involve acknowledged secondary citation, with no such citations
occurringin biology, one in engineering and eight in each of the
other two elds. In no eld isthis feature as common as once per 1000
words. One of the few examples of acknowl-edged secondary citation
is shown in (4).
(4) Despite the commitment and involvement of those who held
pastoral roles, . . .(teachers) were largely ineective because
their eorts were unbacked by astructured programme of skills-based
guidance for success. They saw them-selves as solely concerned with
the provision of emotional rst aid. . . (Ham-based this account of
Bjerrum on Brenner et al.s.
-
D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429 15(5a)
The eect of the weathering process on both the shear strength and
compress-ibility of clay has been explained by Bjerrum (1967) in
the manner illustrated inFigure (2.9). [Eng2 28:2]
(5b) The eect of weathering on strength and compressibility has
been explained by
Secondary Citation
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
SCI ENG HUM SS
Oc
cu
rre
nc
esAcknowledged
Unacknowledged
Fig. 1. Frequency of secondary citation.Bjerrum (1967) in the
manner illustrated in Fig. 2.37. [Brenner, Nutalaya, Chi-lingarian,
and Robertson, 1981, p. 205]
Similarly, in (6a), the student refers to Fischer et al. (1982)
and Lombardi et al.(1985).
(6a) Mannan which is a major constituent of the cell wall in C.
albicans, inhibits aCandida antigen-induced in vitro proliferation
of normal lymphocytes and alsoblocks the antigen-presenting ability
of macrophages (Fischer et al., 1982).//Inaddition, the
polysaccharide fractions from C. albicans stimulate T-cells to
pro-duce a suppressor factor, which inhibits interleukin 1 and
interleukin 2 produc-tion (Lombardi et al., 1985). [Sci2 26:1c]
(6b) Manna, a major constituent of the cell wall in C. albicans,
was detected in theserum of some patients with mucocutaneous
candidiasis (Fischer et al., 1978).Mannan inhibited a Candida
antigen-induced in vitro proliferation of normallymphocytes and
also blocked the antigen-presenting ability of macrophages(Fischer
et al., 1982).//In another study, polysaccharide fractions
(containingmostly mannose and glucose residues) from C. albicans
stimulated the T-cellsto produce a suppressor factor, which in turn
inhibited interleukin 1 and inter-leukin 2 production (Lombardi et
al., 1985). [(Datta, Ganesan, & Natarajan,1989, p. 70)]
-
16 D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429Datta
et al. (1989) refer to the same two sources, and in virtually
identical wording,leading to the nearly inescapable conclusion that
this report of the two sources wasbased on Datta et al.s secondary
account of them, although the citation does notreect that. A
further misleading impression is that it was the student who
identiedrelevant research articles and was able not only to
describe their ndings, but torelate them to each other and show how
each contributes to informing a wider topic.In (6b) we see that
that eort was not the students but Datta et al.s.
This is a substantive point, not merely a formal one, as (7a)
and (7b) demonstrate.(Here and elsewhere, all typographical and
grammatical errors were present in theoriginal, although, to avoid
breaking up the example, the conventional sic isnot used.)
(7a) A major opponent of Shattuck-Hufnagel and Klatts conclusion
is found inGoldstein (1980) and van den Broecke and Goldstein
(1980). Glostein hasfound evidence for feature processing in
16-consonant confusion matricesinvolving speech errors, listening
errors for CV and VC syllables in a noisyenvironment. Van den
Broecke and Goldstein conclude that these robust cat-egorical
features play a role in the representation of consonants during
bothspeech production and perception. This analysis is supplemented
by data fromGerman and Dutch, as is admitted by Shattuck-Hufnagel
and Klatt (1979, p.53), represents the best currently available
evidence for the processing of fea-tures during speech (van den
Broeke and Goldstein also investigated Germanand Dutch data, in
Fromkin, 1980). [H1 33:2]
(7b) A formal way to ask this question has recently been
described by Goldstein(Note 1). He has found evidence for three
features (voicing, continuant, andaspects of place of articulation)
in 16-consonant confusion matrices involving(1) speech errors, (2)
listening errors for CV syllables in noise, and (3) listeningerrors
for VC syllables in noise. He concludes that these robust
categoricalfeatures play a role in the representation of consonants
during both speech pro-duction and perception. This analysis
probably represents the best currentlyavailable evidence for the
processing of features during speech productionand perception, but
it is by no means conclusive. [Shattuck-Hufnagel andKlatt, 1979, p.
53]
In (7a), the writer presents two opposing points of view, one
held by co-authorsShattuck-Hufnagel and Klatt and the other held by
Goldstein, who is cited aloneand together with a co-author, van den
Broecke. The passage begins with the writersassertion that the two
views are in opposition and then outlines Goldsteins evidence,the
conclusions reached by van den Broecke and Goldstein on the basis
of that evi-dence, and nally reports Shattuck-Hufnagel and Klatts
concession that that evi-dence has value. However, on examining
Shattuck-Hufnagel and Klatt, it becomesevident that this account of
work done by their major opponent was written bythem. It was not
the (presumably neutral) writer who had assessed the relative
meritsof these two bodies of work, and the reliability of the
assessment is called into ques-
tion by the knowledge that it was drafted by a partisan in the
conict.
-
D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429 17This,
presumably, is one of the reasons for the widely accepted principle
that sec-ondary citation should be acknowledged: so that the reader
can judge whose inter-pretation is being put forward. Another
reason may be simple accuracy, since themore links in the
transmission of a message, the more inaccuracies can creep
in.Nonetheless, unacknowledged secondary citation was prominent in
this corpus,amounting to 137 source mentions, eight times the
number that were acknowledged,
Secondary Citation / 1000 words
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
4.5Oc
curr
ence
spe
r10
00w
ord
s
Acknowledged
Unacknowledged
SCI ENG HUM SS
Fig. 2. Secondary citation per 1000 words of text.so that 18% of
all source mentions are at second hand (see Fig. 1). The reality
con-icts, therefore, with the supercial appearance that secondary
citation is a marginalfeature. As Fig. 2 shows, the presence of
this feature averages just over 2 occurrencesper 1000 words in the
corpus, and rises to over 4 per 1000 words in the science
andhumanities sub-corpora. It is interesting to note that the
scientists, the group whichacknowledged no secondary citation,
nearly tie with the humanities writers as theheaviest users of
it.
The 17 texts in this corpus thus presented the appearance of
being in compliancewith conventions governing secondary references
to sources. However, when this oc-cluded aspect of source use was
examined more closely, the appearance of confor-mity was not
maintained.
3.2. Details of the sources
Given the preference of urban scholars to publish quickly and in
journals, theexpectation was that the biologists would cite more
journal articles, and more recentones, than the other writers. This
expectation was met: the average age of the sourcescited by the
scientists was 9 years, but more than double that, ranging from 19
to 22years, for the other elds (see Fig. 3). Research articles made
up 85% of the sourcescited by the biologists, but not more that 24%
of those in the other elds (see Fig. 4).
-
18 D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429Source
Age25
Age CitedThe biologists give the impression, therefore, of being
sensitive to the need to con-textualize their work in the most
recent research literature.
However, because of the presence of secondary citation, the
group of sources citedin the writing samples was not precisely the
same as the group of sources which were
0
5
10
15
20
SCI ENG HUM SS
Yea
rsAge Used
Fig. 3. Age of sources.
Citation of RAs
0
20
40
60
80
100
Nu
mbe
ro
fcite
dR
As
[%]
RAs cited
RAs used
SCI ENG HUM SS
Fig. 4. Research articles as a proportion of all sources cited
and used.
-
D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429
19determined actually to have been used. As Fig. 3 shows, when the
sources actuallyused are considered, the picture changes somewhat.
The proportion of RAs amongthe scientists sources is slightly
lower80%. The sources used are also somewhatyounger for all groups
since, clearly, secondary sources have later publication datesthan
the primary sources they report. In (8a), for example, Ingrid cites
a 1994 studyby Kennard et al., but the similarity with Ferreira et
al.s slightly later paper (8b) sug-gests that Ingrid based her
account on the latter.
(8a) In B. oleracea, two marker loci associated with owering
time showed signi-cant additive additive and additive dominant
epistasis in a cross of cabbageand broccoli (Kennard et al.).
[Ingrid 4:1]
(8b) Likewise, in B. oleracea, two marker loci associated with
owering timeshowed signicant additive additive and additive
dominant epistasis in across of cabbage and broccoli (Kennard et
al., 1994). [Ferreira, Stagopan, Yan-dell, Williams, and Osborn,
1995, p. 731]
The relevance of giving a misleading impression about the age of
sources dependson the discipline involved. For the urban
biologists, citing and using recently pub-lished sources is
positive. However, the fact that the sources used by the
scientistswere more recent on average than those cited does not
indicate that they were alsomore up-to-date, as (9) illustrates.
The sources cited in (9a) are research articles,but as in example
(5), the source appears to have been Datta et al. (1989), which
isnot a research article but a review article of Current trends in
Candida Albicans re-search. Thus, while the source used for this
passage is in fact newer than those whichwere cited, it is simply a
retelling of older ndings and not a report of newer ones.
(9a) True hyphal cells have perforated septa and the cell
junctions are not con-stricted. Chlamydospores are thick walled
asexual spores formed by the round-ing up of pre-existing cells
(Odds et al., 1985; Torosantucci and Cassone, 1983).[Sci2
18:2bii]
(9b) True hyphal cells are longer than blastoconidia and have
perforated septa; celljunctions are not constricted. Chlamydospores
are thick-walled asexual sporesformed by the rounding up of
pre-existing cells (Torosantucci and Cassone,1983; Odds, 1985).
[Datta et al., 1989, pp. 5859]
By contrast, some research topics benet from a historical
grounding, and refer-ence to some older sources speaks to the
writer having taken an appropriately broadtime perspective. Such an
impression given by Kwans discussion of educational eval-uation in
(10a), in which she appears to trace the changing understanding of
evalu-ation, citing Tyler as an example of the early 20th century
view, Cronbach for the1960s and Popham on a change that had come
about by the 1970s. From (10b) itis clear that the historical
progression has been outlined by Popham. Kwans rolehas been to
condense Pophams overview (the ellipses in the quotation from
Pophamrepresent signicant amounts of omitted text), rather than to
synthesize the original
sources.
-
20 D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429(10a)
For centuries evaluation has been used by classroom teachers as an
equivalentof testing. Later on in early 1900s evaluation was
accorded by some research-ers a dierent function, i.e., appraisal
of an educational programmes quality.(Tyler, for example.) Then in
1960s Cronbach argued in one of his articlesentitled Course
Improvement Through Evaluation for the necessity of focus-sing
educational evaluation on the development process of a
programme(1963). In the early 1970s, evaluation was seen as a
facilitator for decision-making in educational programmes. As
Popham puts it In the early 1970s,however, there was a pervasive
belief that well-conducted educational evalu-ations could, and
should, constitute the single most important factor in therendering
of educational decisions. (1988:5). [Kwan 2:3]
(10b) For centuries the term evaluation has been used by
classroom teachers. . . Formost educators, indeed, the idea of
evaluation was essentially equivalent tothe idea of testing. . . In
1932 Ralph W. Tyler. . . came to view evaluationnot as the
appraisal of students, but rather as the appraisal of an
educationalprograms quality. . . In a 1963 article entitled Course
Improvement throughEvaluation,. . . Cronbach argued that if
educational evaluation were to be ofassistance to curriculum
developers, it had to be focused on the decisionsfaced by
curriculum specialists during the process of their
developmenteorts. . . In the early 1970s, however, there was a
pervasive belief that well-conducted educational evaluations could,
and should, constitute the singlemost important factor in the
rendering of educational decisions. [Popham,1988, pp. 12]
Thus, with regard to the types of sources cited and used, the
writers again can beseen to have conformed supercially to
disciplinary expectations. The urban biolo-gists cited much more
recent ndings, and a high proportion of research articles,compared
with the writers in the other three elds. These tendencies were,
however,less marked in the actual source use.
3.3. Imported language
It was expected that the science and engineering writers would
avoid explicit quo-tation, and that those in the humanities and
social sciences would use it as a minoritystrategy, and this proved
to be the case. Among the eight science and engineeringtexts, only
one, a masters dissertation in engineering, includes explicit
quotation.On the other hand, the humanities and social science
texts contain 181 quotations(see Fig. 5).
(11) However, despite the research and studies on this subject,
both the nature andscope of personal and social education remain
controversial. (Galloway, 1990,p. 1). [Graciela 2:2]
(12) Indeed, Trumper and Rizzi (1985) maintain that since the
origins of this phe-nomenon aect not only Greek, it is more
plausible to talk about a Sprach-
bund balcanico-calabrese meridionale-salentina (p. 70). [H2
42:1a]
-
D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429
21Quotation is, however, a visible feature only as long as it is
signaled. Ordinarily, areader assumes that language not signaled as
quotation has been composed by thewriter, not repeated from another
source. However, in this corpus that assumptionis not reliable.
Numerous passages contain language repeated (nearly) verbatim froma
source, without quotation marks, and often without mention of the
source. Exam-ples of this appear in (13), (14) and (15).
(13a) Sensitivity, S, is usually dened as the ratio between the
undisturbed shear
Presence of Quotations
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
Occ
urre
nces
SCI ENG HUM SS
Fig. 5. Frequency of signaled quotation.strength to the
remoulded shear strength, as determined either from vane testor
from unconned compression test. [Eng2 23:5]
(13b) Sensitivity, St, is usually dened as the ratio of the
undisturbed shear strengthto the remoulded shear strength,
determined either from vane tests or fromunconned compression
tests. [Brenner et al., 1981, pp. 214215]
(14a) This view is not shared by those who distinguish that the
practices appropriatein the pastoral sphere may not always be
appropriate in the academic sphere(and vice versa), and even that
separate organisational arrangements may benecessary (Best,
Ribbins, Jarvis, & Oddy, 1983, p. 276). [Graciela 3:2]
(14b) . . . there are grounds for arguing that the practices
appropriate in the pastoralsphere may not always be appropriate in
the academic sphere (and vice versa),and even that separate
organizational arrangements may be necessary. [Bestet al., 1983, p.
276]
(15a) The control of owering time is a process of primary
importance in agricul-ture and also of great scientic interest for
the understanding of plant devel-opment. [Ingrid 3:1a]
(15b) The control of owering time is a process of primary
importance in agricul-ture and also of great scientic interest for
the understanding of plant devel-opment. [Lagercrantz, Putterill,
Coupland, and Lydiate, 1996, p. 13]
-
80
22 D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006)
429Repetition of this sort is surprisingly common in the corpus.
Considered as a pro-portion of the parts of the writing samples
which were compared to their sources,
0
20
40
60
Port
ion
Repe
ated
[%]
SCI ENG HUM SS
Fig. 6. Unattributed quotation as a proportion of compared
writing samples.Unattributed Quotation100and excluding language
signaled as quotation, 41% of the corpus consists of lan-guage
repeated without attribution from sources. Interestingly, as Fig. 6
shows,the writers who relied most on unsignaled repetition from
their sources were the biol-ogiststhe group which made no use at
all of signaled quotation.
In three respects, thenthe use of secondary citation, the nature
of the sourcesreported and the use of explicit quotationthe texts
give the appearance of con-forming closely to expectations.
Standards for secondary citation are likely to bebroadly shared
across academic areas, while disciplines dier in the types of
sourcesused, and the acceptability of quoting language from a
source. With regard to thetype and age of the source referred to,
the prole presented by the science writerssharply diers from the
other three groups, and Bechers urban and rural distinctionoers an
explanation for the dierence. The presence or absence of signaled
quota-tion is accounted for by the familiar distinction between
hard and soft subject areas.In all three areas, the visible aspects
of source use approximate disciplinary expecta-tions more closely
than the occluded aspects, which in some cases violate
commonstandards.
4. Explaining the divergence
Why did the writers in this study use sources in ways which so
sharply divergedfrom the predictable expectations of their
discourse communities? Were the mis-
-
leadininapp
D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429 23permit
a full discussion of the role of intention in plagiarism, it should
be notedthat a current trend in composition theory is concerned
with providing alternativeexplanations for dependence on the
language of sources. Howard (1995, 1999) hascoined the term
patchwriting to describe the dependence of novice writers on
thelanguage of their sources, and argues that this is a common
developmental stage.Anecdotal accounts of writers who use the
language of their sources without ade-quate attribution, but who
seem to be motivated by something other than astraightforward
intention to cheat, can be found in Crocker and Shaw (2002),
Cur-rie (1998), Hull and Rose (1989), Matalene (1985), and Petric
(2004), among oth-ers, and empirical evidence is provided by
Pecorari (2003). Barks and Watts (2001)argue for the need to raise
students awareness of the complexities of issues insource use,
complexities which electronic media augment (Belcher, 2001;
Bloch,2001).
A number of alternatives are therefore available to the view
that apparent plagia-rism stems from an intentionally deceptive
act. A further explanation that can beadded to these is the role
that visibility and occlusion play in students eorts to entertheir
discourse communities. Visibility is a key element in Lave and
Wengers (1991)articulation of legitimate peripheral participation.
In the successful apprenticeshipthey describe for tailors in West
Africa, novices performed small tasks which ex-posed the
relationship between pieces of a garment and the whole. By
contrast,apprentice butchers in a supermarket were blocked from
learning, in part by thephysical layout of the workplace, which
prevented them from seeing what the skilledworkers did: the working
practices they were to learn were quite literally invisible tothem.
Visibility is achieved when novices can observe the work processes,
and notmerely their products.
Theses and dissertations are often produced and assessed with
emphasis on theproduct. It is reasonable to think that students
model their own eorts at least in parton the scholarly publications
they read; they can, however, observe only the visiblefeatures of
the nished product. Students reading a published research article
canonly guess whether the writer always consulted primary sources,
cited sources accu-rately and signaled all quotations; a similar
blind spot aects supervisors reading stu-dent texts. The processes
and features that are not visible cannot be observed, butonly
inferred.
In interviews, the student writers whose texts were investigated
here emphasizedthe tentative nature of their inferences. Ingrid, a
biologist, explained that she wasuncertain to some extent about her
writing but tried to observe what other writersdid: I think
everyones doing it in more or less the same way. Having made
theirbest eorts, the students relied upon their advisors to judge
their success. As Roulasaid:
thats why I think the tutor has to. . . be a part of the whole
thing, to read theparaphrases and quotations and tell you if youre
doing the right place, or ifg aspects of source use intentional?
This last is an important question sinceropriate source use may be
interpreted as plagiarism. While space does notyou have to rewrite
it, or if you dont have to just mention it at all.
-
unawsuperand tand tcomm
24 D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429come
to the study of plants through a background in animal biology and
thatmuch of the relevant literature was new to her. However, he
concluded, Shesmade a reasonable job of trying to understand what
people are doing and whytheyre trying to do it. Dr. Frost
criticized Ingrids work for referencing a rela-tively small
proportion of the available literature on the topic but said
clearlyshes found a lot of key ones, adding that the program wanted
students to givetheir topics broad coverage, and yes, she has.
However, when we looked to-gether at Ingrids text and its sources,
this assessment changed sharply. Dr. Frostwas clear in categorizing
Ingrids strategies as inappropriate: That is not whattheyre
expected to do, and if Id spotted it I would have been very
concerned aboutit, yes [emphasis added].
The occluded aspects of academic writing were, therefore, in a
blind spot for thestudents and supervisors both. Certainly the
students could have asked their super-visors to comment on their
performance, but doing so would have presupposed anawareness of
what issues need comment. From the supervisors side,
investigatingthe occluded features of every student text would have
been impossible in practicalterms. Dr. Frost noted this
reality:
It worries me that she has taken a large chunk very much
verbatim from pub-lished work and it doesnt surprise me that were
not spotting it with so manycoming through all we do, youve got
half an hour for each project report,theres no way most people
would have the time to go back and check to whatextent this sort of
straight copying has occurred. Im not happy about it.
More importantly though, investigating the occluded features
would reect suspicionof the text. Precisely because the
relationship between a source and a report of it isoccluded, it is
widely accepted that source reports should be transparent; that is,
theyshould use the conventional signals to create an accurate
portrait of the relationship(Groom, 2000; Tadros, 1993). The
absence of transparency is more often treated as aquestion of
academic ethics than of skills. An advisor would ordinarily
investigatethe occluded features of a students text only if he or
she suspected deliberate, trans-gressive behavior. That,
thankfully, is not part of the typical advisor-student rela-
tionsare of the problems with source use. Early in our
interviews, I asked thevisors to comment generally on the strengths
and weaknesses of the texts,heir responses indicated that although
the dissertation samples were drafts,herefore oered scope for
improvement, they were broadly acceptable. Theents of Dr. Frost,
Ingrids supervisor, are revealing. He noted that she hadIngrid,
whose work leant heavily on its sources, agreed: I just do what I
think I sup-posed to and they never actually make that much
comments about it. (Here andelsewhere, quotations from the
interviews are verbatim, with nonstandard lexicaland grammatical
usage maintained.)
The writers applied a straightforward principle: they inferred
rules, attempted toput them into practice, and waited for feedback.
When the feedback did not in-clude comments on source use, the
students assumed that theirs was appropriate,along with the
inferences that guided it. For similar reasons the supervisors
werehip. Thus, worryingly, these students and supervisors
approached their tasks
-
versitinstansuper
D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429 25(16)
The medium developed by Murashige and Skoog (1962) (see Appendix:
Stu-dent sources) for tobacco tissue culture is being used
extensively in micro prop-agation of Mentha, as well as other
plants. [Erden 3:1a]
Because this paper was conspicuous by being much older than the
others Erdencited, I asked him and his supervisor to comment on it.
Erden explained that themedium described in the paper is one which
everybody uses. His supervisor con-curred that the paper was widely
used and cited, but not widely read:
A journal would insist on. . . that reference, Murashige and
Skoog must beamong the most widely cited papers ever and virtually
nobody will have readit but everybody has to cite it.
The apparent paradox lies in the fact that theMurashige and
Skoog medium, which issold commercially, already prepared, is
widely enough used not to need explanationor justication. The
authors who rst described it are cited primarily to give credit
fortheir innovation. Understanding this as a legitimate exception
to general rules aboutciting secondary sources requires an
understanding of the specic disciplinary context.
Other exceptions have been documented. Devitt (1991), in her
study of the genresof tax accounting, describes a common practice
which she terms unmarked quota-tion, what teachers might call
plagiarism and which often suits the rhetoricalneeds and especially
the epistemological values of the accounting community(p. 348).
Prior (1998, p. 136) reports an instance of what was apparently
unattributedsecondary citation in the work of the student he calls
Mai. Mai cited one author(Erickson) but her text appears to have
stronger similarities with another authors(McLaughlins) account of
Erickson, along with language repeated from McLaugh-lin. Yet Prior
shows that McLaughlins text in turn has language in common with
Ericky-wide level, and not considered to need a
discipline-specic approach. Yet thece of unattributed secondary
citation in (16) was defended by the student andvisor involved as
entirely appropriate.with strategies which left the occluded source
features not only uninvestigated butalso unsuspected.
Non-normative source use was not detected because it was
occluded. How did itarise in the rst place? Of a number of factors
which may have contributed to thesituation, two are closely related
to the question of occlusion. First, the fact thatsource
relationships are occluded to the reader of a text aected both the
supervisors,as readers of their students work, and the students, as
readers of the scholarly liter-ature. The students prime
opportunities to learnobservations of texts in theirelds, and
feedbackonly educated them about visible textual features.
Second, occluded textual features may mask a gap between what
the academiccommunity says it expects, and what is actually done. A
case in point is the reportingof secondary sources. In a survey of
university plagiarism policies (Pecorari, 2001)unacknowledged
secondary citation was actually identied as a form of
plagiarism,evidence that secondary citation is addressedat least at
some institutionsat a uni-son, but not marked as quotation.
-
ton acknowledges X) and non-factive verbs (Stilton proposes X)
convey quite distinctevaluations. Whether the evaluation which is
signaled to the reader is that which is
26 D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006)
429intended by the writer is ordinarily occluded to the reader. The
chance that occlusionmasks an unintended evaluation is, presumably,
higher when the writer is less expe-rienced, and when the writer is
an NNSE.
Occlusion gave the texts studied here a supercial appearance of
appropriateness,masking potential or actual problems which an ad
hoc approach to thesis supervi-sion could not reveal. This suggests
that the project of learning about the occludedaspects of academic
texts can be facilitated by an apprenticeship approach. It isworth
noting that the thesis with the most appropriate source use, that
of H2, in-cluded in its reference list a paper co-authored by the
student with the supervisor.Although it would be wrong to read too
much into this isolated case, it is possiblethat co-authoring a
paper provided this student with an experience of
situatedlearning.
Adding elements of apprenticeship to postgraduate advising may
or may not beAt least two explanations are available for these
seemingly exceptional cases. Onone hand, they may simply illustrate
that unconventional source use is not limited tostudents. However,
the case of the Murashige and Skoog medium seems to indicateeither
that university-wide prescriptions do not accurately reect the
practices of thedisciplines, or that individuals may interpret
general principles dierently, or both. Ifso, one implication is
that the source use documented here which appears to departfrom
accepted standards may in some cases simply signal adherence to a
set of localstandards. Another implication is that the task of
novices learning to write in theirdisciplines may have an
additional level of complexity: not only must they be obser-vant of
visible practices and somehow learn and negotiate the occluded
practices,they must also be sensitive to the competing levels at
which practice is regulated.Their task could be facilitated by
research into the writing practices that are accept-able in the
disciplines.
5. Conclusion
The ndings presented here have pointed to the fact that
fundamental aspects ofacademic writing are occluded and therefore
go unaddressed, with the worrying con-sequence that students may
leave the university with important writing skills un-learned. Even
more worryingly, the writers studied here used sources in wayswhich
might be labeled plagiarism, with potentially grave consequences
should theyapply the same writing strategies later in their
academic careers.
Swaless (1996) discussion of occlusion has been extended here in
two ways. First,occlusion has been shown to mask aspects of texts
from established members of theacademic discourse community as well
as novices; and second, it has been appliednot only to certain
genres but to some features of visible genres. Other occluded
fea-tures remain to be identied. Reporting verbs, for example, are
evaluative (e.g.,Thompson & Ye, 1991). To the experienced
reader, factive reporting verbs (e.g., Stil-an achievable objective
in practical terms. An apprenticeship approach calls on
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Maggie Charles and Philip Shaw for their
comments on earlydrafts of this paper.
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D. Pecorari / English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 429 29Diane
Pecorari is a senior lecturer in the Department of Humanities at
Malardalen University in Sweden,where she teaches English applied
linguistics and academic writing. Her research interests include
writingacross the disciplines and discourse analysis.
Visible and occluded citation features in postgraduate
second-language writingIntroductionMethodsEstablishing disciplinary
expectationsExamining the visible featuresExamining the occluded
features
Visible and occluded source use in the writing samplesSecondary
citationDetails of the sourcesImported language
Explaining the
divergenceConclusionAcknowledgementsReferences