TYPES AND FUNCTIONS OF CITATIONS IN MASTER’S THESES ACROSS DISCIPLINES AND LANGUAGES
Vol.10,No.2(2017)
Citation is an essential and common feature of academic writing and is used by academic
writers to achieve different purposes. This study investigated disciplinary variations
in terms of citation practices in the genre of Master’s theses with a specific focus on
discussions. To this end, sixty discussions produced by MA/MS students of two key
universities in Iran from both hard and soft disciplines were analyzed in terms of citation
types and functions. The medium of writing whether English or Persian was also taken
into account for its probable influence on the employed citation practices. The results
revealed that integral citations were used more frequently by writers in soft knowledge
fields, allowing them to make evaluations, whereas non-integral citations were mostly
used by hard discipline writers. As for rhetorical functions, Support and Comparison were
the dominant functions in these text types. However, there existed subtle differences both
in the degree and the way these writers draw intertextual links to their disciplines. The
findings can be of considerable help to EAP instructors and thesis supervisors to raise their
students’ awareness and refine their understanding of citation strategies in thesis writing.
citation strategies; disciplinary variation; discourse community; discussion; Master’s thesis
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