Mark Wolfersberger

Second Language Writing from Sources: an Ethnographic Study of an Argument Essay Task Mark Wolfersberger

Writing from sources is a common academic task for L2students in higher education. It is a task thatrequires the orchestration of numerous skills such asreading source texts, incorporating information fromthe source texts within the written text, and readingthe rhetorical context to interpret the task. Thisbook reports on an ethnographic study that followedthe experiences of four L2 students enrolled in arequired academic writing course as they workedthrough an argument essay task. The two majorchallenges uncovered were building an accurate mentalrepresentation of the writing task and maneuveringaround the contexts of plagiarism. The participants?task representations were constantly changing andwere heavily influenced through interactions with theteacher. Low L2 proficiency constrained theperformance of some of the participants resulting inone participant plagiarizing in order to meet theperceived task requirements and another participantslighting part of the task in order to avoid plagiarism.