Second Language Writing From Sources

Writing from sources is a common academic task for L2 students in higher education. It is a task that requires the orchestration of numerous skills such as reading source texts, incorporating information from the source texts within the written text, and reading the rhetorical context to interpret the task. This book reports on an ethnographic study that followed the experiences of four L2 students enrolled in a required academic writing course as they worked through an argument essay task. The two major challenges uncovered were building an accurate mental representation of the writing task and maneuvering around the contexts of plagiarism. The participants task representations were constantly changing and were heavily influenced through interactions with the teacher. Low L2 proficiency constrained the performance of some of the participants resulting in one participant plagiarizing in order to meet the perceived task requirements and another participant slighting part of the task in order to avoid plagiarism.