Establishing Textual Authority and Separating Voices: A New Approach to Teaching Referencing

K nowing how to reference is important not only for students studying in Eng-lish-speaking countries, but also for those who might want to publish in English-medium journals. In many universities, however, it is often just assumed that students know how to reference, and approaches to teach-ing referencing are little more than a public reading of the institution’s plagiarism policy. As English language teachers, we need to take the lead in designing a coherent referencing curriculum to enable our students to authoritatively quote and paraphrase so they are better equipped to achieve their academic goals. Ironically, our theoretical under-standings have far outstripped con-ventional approaches to teaching referencing. We now know, for instance, that English language learners by and large do not plagiarize deceitfully. We know that using bits and pieces of other texts may be integral to language learning. And we know that referenc-ing is tied to our ability to establish tex-tual authority. But how do we address these issues in class? Over semesters of discussion with students about the differences between their writing cultures and my U.S. academic one, I found that difficulties with referencing are con-nected to differences in how students read and write texts. In response, I developed a new approach to teaching referencing based on establishing tex-tual authority and separating writers’ voices. Because I teach composition as a theme-based course, my referencing lessons relate to theme-based reading and writing assignments. In this article, I first present a short discussion of key theoretical ideas that inform the approach, and then I describe five lessons, four of which are integrated into the course theme of “homelessness. ” There are many reasons why I use this theme. Perhaps most important, I find that homelessness, together with poverty more generally, is a theme that i