Teaching Second-Language ESP Students to Write Good Specialized Texts: Issues of Intertextuality and Plagiarism
Natalja Nikolayeva, Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU), Associate professor, English Language Department (Russian Federation)
Ekaterina Lezhneva, Bauman Moscow State Technical University, The Department of Linguistics (Russian Federation)
Abstract
Writing appropriate academic and specialized texts in English is a great intellectual challenge for second-language (L2) learners in Russian tertiary education settings. The most intriguing issue is how to deal with intertextuality as a sophisticated linguistic tool involving awareness of interdiscursivity and plagiarism. The letter is a topic of considerable concern across both L2 students and English language teachers because of its serious socio-cultural and ethical repercussions as well as the complexity of its understanding and avoidance. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the current state of knowledge on intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and plagiarism with particular reference to their manifestations in specialist discourses in order to outline the implications for ESP teachers and learners. Based on the literature review and our own discourse analysis of technical texts of various genres conducted together with Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU) students, we demonstrate the existence of regular patterns in lexicogrammatical and rhetorical structures, phraseology, compositional and some other features as evidence of interdiscursivity at work and the urgent necessity to drill ESP students in using them in their own writing according to the developed discursive conventions and genre peculiarities. We also analyze the students’ acknowledgment of manifest intertextuality in the specialized discourses for revealing whether they perceive integral and non-integral references to the source as an obligatory device in ESP writing. The preliminary test results expose that only 37.1 % of BMSTU students regard the reference to the source as a necessity, but only 9.6 % can do them properly, which means a low level of intertextual competence of our undergraduates as well as possibility of textual plagiarism. After developing and trying out a pilot course on teaching BMSTU students how to apply intertextual strategies (direct quoting, paraphrasing by using reporting phrases, text restructuring), identifying and avoiding plagiarism in their written texts, the final text results were considerably better with 85.8 % of positive performances. In conclusion, intertextuality presents challenges for both ESP students and teachers. The study reveals that the specificity of cultural, academic, linguistic, and scientific backgrounds can also influence the students’ intertextual competence. Avoiding plagiarism requires the ability to incorporate appropriate intertextual relationships in writing. To the extent that students may lack an awareness of the plagiarism seriousness, they need to be supplied with the declarative knowledge about unacceptable writing practices in ESP contexts.
Keywords English for Specific Purposes (ESP), Second Language Learning, Intertextual Competence, Intertextuality, Interdiscursivity, Plagiarism