ERIC Number: EJ998429
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013-Jun
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1475-1585
EISSN: N/A
Three ESL Students Writing a Policy Paper Assignment: An Activity-Analytic Perspective
Li, Yongyan
Journal of English for Academic Purposes, v12 n2 p73-86 Jun 2013
How university students write from sources has been an issue of long-standing interest among researchers of advanced academic literacy. Previous research in this regard in the context of L2 writing has tended to focus on novices' textual borrowing; less attention has been given to exploring the potential light that theories from other intellectual domains may shed upon students' process of source-based academic writing. The study to be reported in this paper used activity theory as an analytic tool to examine three ESL students' activities of fulfilling a policy paper assignment at a university in Hong Kong. In the paper I present a description of the activity system concerned and its internal contradictions, characterize the sequences of actions that constituted the individual students' activities, and analyze the students' source-use practices in terms of their efforts to address a set of source-bound systemic tensions. At the end of the paper I propose a few lines of future explorations using activity theory as a heuristic to study literacy activities in academic contexts. (Contains 3 tables and 4 figures.)
Descriptors: English for Academic Purposes, Literacy, Foreign Countries, Novices, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, College Students, Writing (Composition), Assignments, Citations (References), Second Language Instruction, Writing Instruction
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Hong Kong
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A