Using a Reading Journal to Develop Source Use Competencies for Academic Writing [Paper]

Abstract

Appropriate incorporation of source material in academic writing can be challenging for university students, and those who struggle to demonstrate competency in this area can run into issues with plagiarism. Pedagogic approaches to reducing plagiarism often take the complementary routes of explicit teaching on academic integrity combined with instruction on source use and referencing (Pecorari and Petric, 2014). This presentation will describe an instructional tool used in an Academic Reading course on a pre-Masters program for students entering an EMI university in Kazakhstan. Students are required to keep a Reading Journal throughout the two semester course. This involves sustained practice in referencing and record-keeping, summarising, note-taking and responding to ideas in a text, all stages which are recognised as foundational before students are able to successfully incorporate source material into their written work while maintaining a clear distinction between the student’s thoughts and the author’s words and ideas (Cumming, Lai and Cho, 2016). In this session, the presenters will describe the pedagogic theory underpinning the Reading Journal design and implementation in their course, give some reflections on its use in practice, and invite audience members to consider applications in their own teaching and course design contexts.