Abstract

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.