L2 writers’ use of outside sources and the related challenges

Researchers have called for the development of new pedagogical strategies to help students learn how to integrate source information into their own texts effectively (Casanave, 2017; Hu, 2015). Since these strategies are tied to particular pedagogical contexts, their development has to be preceded by a careful examination of the context where they will be implemented. To that end, the current study examined how students use sources in their own writing at an English-medium university in Canada and what challenges they face in doing so. Notes and essays written by English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students (N = 73) were analyzed in terms of how they used source text information. A subset of the students and five experienced instructors were interviewed to gain insight into students’ challenges with the source-based writing tasks required in the EAP program. The findings indicate that students face difficulty with both the reading and writing phases of source-based writing, which has implications for the development of pedagogical strategies to address these difficulties