Journal of English for Academic Purposes 23 (2016) 47e58

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Journal of English for Academic Purposes

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jeap

Students' writing from sources for academic purposes: A

synthesis of recent research
Alister Cumming a, b, *, Conttia Lai a, Hyeyoon Cho a
a
Centre for Educational Research on Languages and Literacies, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, 252 Bloor
Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada
b
Beijing Foreign Studies University, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Educators have long recognized that a major challenge for students learning to write for
Received 17 February 2016 academic purposes is developing the ability to integrate source material effectively and
Received in revised form 7 June 2016 appropriately into written compositions. To identify and evaluate the current state of
Accepted 8 June 2016
empirical evidence, we conducted a systematic synthesis of the published research that
has investigated writing from sources systematically from a variety of analytic perspec-
tives, in first and second languages, and in diverse contexts internationally including
Keywords:
students in universities, colleges, and secondary schools. Five general claims emerged
Writing from sources
Instruction
across our analyses of 69 empirical studies published in refereed journals or books in
Student development English from 1993 to 2013. Each claim has firm empirical support but each also warrants
English for academic purposes further research and refinement: (1) students experience difficulties with, but develop
certain strategies to deal with, the complex processes of writing from sources; (2) prior
knowledge and experience influence students' performance in writing from sources; (3)
differences may appear between L1 and L2 students in their understanding and uses of
sources in writing; (4) performance in tasks that involve writing from sources varies by
task conditions and types of texts written and read; and (5) instruction can help students
improve their uses of sources in their writing.
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Educators around the world would agree that learning to write effectively from sources is a fundamental academic literacy
skill normally acquired during secondary and higher education. It is a major learning outcome from university studies (Beach,
Newell, & VanDerHeide, 2016; Collis & Biggs, 1983; Haswell, 2000; McAlpine & Amundsen, 2011). Writing from sources is also
a process of demonstrating the acquisition of new knowledge, a means of establishing membership and identity within
academic discourse communities, and a common requirement for course papers and tests (Hirvela, 2011; Hood, 2008; Ivanic,
1998, 2004; Leki, 2007; Lillis & Curry, 2010; Melzer, 2009; Sternglass, 1997; Tardy, 2009). There is increasing evidence that
writing effectively from sources is a requisite, threshold ability that students need in order to be able to engage proficiently in
academic studies in a second or an additional language (Cumming, 2013, 2014; Cumming et al., 2005; Gentil, 2011; Huang,
2010; Macqueen, 2012; Raymond & Parks, 2002; Rea-Dickins, Kiely, & Yu, 2007; Rosenfeld, Leung, & Oltman, 2001). At the
same time, researchers have long acknowledged that knowing how to write effectively from sources is not only a challenge for

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: alister.cumming@utoronto.ca (A. Cumming).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2016.06.002
1475-1585/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
48 A. Cumming et al. / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 23 (2016) 47e58

students to learn but also for instructors to know how best to teach (Graham & Perin, 2007; Nelson, 2008; Pecorari & Petric,
2014).
Reviewing relevant research, and asserting its integral importance for language learning and teaching, Grabe and Zhang
(2013, p. 9) defined writing from sources as follows:
Learning to write from textual sources (e.g., integrating complementary sources of information, interpreting concep-
tually difficult information) is a challenging skill that even native speaking students have to work hard to master …
Tasks that require reading/writing integration, such as summarizing, synthesizing information, critically responding to
text input, or writing a research paper, require a great deal of practice.
Other recent reviews by experts such as Flowerdew and Li (2007), Pecorari (2016), and Pecorari and Petric (2014) have
observed that although educators have for several decades (e.g., Pennycook, 1996) questioned the “received view of
plagiarism as a transgressive act” (Pecorari & Petric, 2014, p. 269), most of the relevant published research has analyzed
students' writing from sources as inadequately or inappropriately developed forms of “intertextuality” (Bazerman, 2004;
Chandrasoma, Thompson, & Pennycook, 2004; Ivanic, 1998), “textual borrowing” (Belcher & Hirvela, 2001; Currie, 1998;
Shi, 2010), or “patchwriting” (Howard, 1999) that may arise inadvertently from lack of awareness of discourse, cultural, or
genre conventions or limited linguistic or rhetorical abilities rather than intentionally as deceit in respect to institutional
policies or academic standards.
Given the continuing interest in and importance of this topic from diverse perspectives, the growing accumulation of
empirical studies, and ongoing debates about how to conceptualize writing from sources, we decided it was time to syn-
thesize the available research systematically to try to establish what it has revealed collectively about how students actually
develop abilities to write from sources in academic settings. Rather than engaging in further polemics about terminology or
plagiarism or trying to duplicate the reviews based on experts' impressions that have already appeared, we opted to follow
principles of research synthesis to identify, analyze, and evaluate the existing corpus of published research and its collective
results. We wanted to find out what is known from valid, reliable empirical research about students developing abilities to
write from sources in academic contexts. Accordingly, we limited our focus to studies of learning, development, and in-
struction in educational settings rather than attempting to address the many studies that have also been done in the related,
but distinctly different, contexts of language or writing tests (e.g., see Deane, 2011; Yu, 2013), workplaces (e.g., see Beaufort,
2006; Henry, 2000), or publication for professional purposes (after completion of educational programs) (e.g., see K. Hyland,
2015; Lillis & Curry, 2010).

1. Method

To guide our inquiry and selection and interpretations of research publications, we formulated a central research question:
How do students develop abilities to write papers from sources for academic purposes in instructional contexts?
We followed conventional procedures for research synthesis specified by Cooper, Hedges and Valentine (2009) and Norris
and Ortega (2006). At the outset, we were not certain if we would find sufficient results for a full meta-analysis (involving
statistical syntheses of primary results). While progressing in the study, we realized that we would need to be satisfied with a
research synthesis that is more of a systematic content analysis rather than a full meta-analysis. That is, we realized that
trying to compile and compare results statistically was neither logical nor feasible because the extant research about writing
from sources entails too many diverse educational contexts and populations; different purposes, research designs, languages
of instruction and learning, and indicators of achievement; as well as research and reporting of varying quality (cf. Plonsky &
Oswald, 2014; Plonsky, 2014). Circumscribing the scope and diversity of the research, though, may be one of our major
findings, as observed below.
After agreeing on our guiding research question, the second and third authors of this article conducted systematic searches
of the computer data bases in the University of Toronto library to identify research published between 1993 (when
considerable research on the topic began to emerge) and 2013 (one year before the end of our project funding in 2014). The
databases consulted were Canadian Business and Current Affairs Education, Education Resources Information Center,
FRANCIS, Linguistics and Language Behaviour Abstracts, Modern Language Association International, ProQuest Educational
Journals, PsycINFO, and Scholars' Portal. Five categories of keywords were used for the searches: (1) “academic” and “writ*” or
“compos*”, (2) “cit*”, “paraphras*”, “quot*” or “summar*”, (3) “discourse synthesis”, “intertextual*”, “source material”,
“textual borrowing”, “use of source text” or “writing from sources”, (4) “college” or “universit*” and “high school” or “sec-
ondary school”, and (5) “learn*”. In the first search, we used keyword combinations of categories 1, 2, and 4. For example, one
of the combinations was “academic” and “writ*” or “compos*” and “cit*” and “college” or “universit*”. For the second search,
we used the combinations of keywords in category 3, the terms observed frequently in the studies found in the first search
and the keywords in category 4. Since we decided to focus on studies of students' learning and development, the keyword
“learn*” was added to the previous two searches in the third inquiry. These keywords permitted coverage of either American
or British spelling while allowing us to identify studies with a primary focus on writing from sources in academic settings. The
search results elicited some studies that examined reading to write, a preliminary crucial step in writing from sources,
although reading per se was not a primary focus of our inquiry (e.g., Ascencio
n Delaney, 2008; Boscolo, Ariasi, Del Favero, &
Ballarin, 2011; Segev-Miller, 2004; Wolfe, 2002).
 A. Cumming et al. / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 23 (2016) 47e58 49

The research question above was our guiding criterion for inclusion of publications. As observed above, to focus our
analyses on students' performance and development in instructional contexts, we excluded publications that focused
solely on tests, the topic of plagiarism, publication for professional purposes, or work contexts. To ensure the quality of
the research reviewed, we also excluded studies that did not involve systematic empirical research (e.g., simple self-
attestations about teaching practices) or had not received external peer review prior to publication (e.g., not unpub-
lished theses or conference presentations). We only considered publications written in English but included studies of
writing in first and second languages (which turned out mostly to be English but also other languages such as Spanish or
Italian) among young adults and adolescents in secondary schools, universities, or language programs. Reference lists of
retrieved publications were also scanned to identify additional publications such as chapters in books that had received
peer reviews.
All three authors of this article met about every two weeks over 10 months to consider, discuss, compile, and refine the
findings reported below. Specifically, we read the abstracts of, and then pared down, a list of more than 200 publications
initially generated from the library searches to 49 studies relevant to our guiding research question and criteria. After further
reading and pursuit of publications (i.e., references cited in publications retrieved), we expanded the list to the 69 articles
analyzed below. Next, the second and third authors separately read each publication in full to evaluate the quality of the
research as either as strong (3), medium (2), or weak (1) following a set of guidelines we established for criteria of the quality
of each study's research methods, analysis, trustworthiness, and validity (based on Creswell, 2008; Do €rnyei, 2007). For pri-
marily quantitative studies, these criteria evaluated the sample size, research instruments, duration of the inquiry, use of a
pilot or preliminary study, sophistication of statistical analyses, reported reliability and description of measures, information
sufficient to permit replication, support for valid interpretations, and potential for generalizability. For primarily qualitative
studies, the criteria evaluated uses of multiple, complementary sources of data, extent and duration of data collection,
ecological validity in natural contexts, multiple levels of analysis, verbatim extracts of data to convey reader validity, and the
researchers' reflexivity to support judgements about claims. Individual ratings of 1, 2, or 3 for each of these criteria were
tallied and combined across the two raters then divided by the number of criteria and raters to compute a simple total score of
1, 2, or 3 for each research study. The two raters agreed on 80% of these evaluations (Spearman's r ¼ 0.71) or Kappa 0.62
(p < 0.001), 95% CI (0.44, 0.82) then discussed discrepancies together to resolve them. They then categorized the types of
research methods and findings appearing in the publications and their primary foci of analyses. All three researchers then
reviewed, interpreted, discussed together, and synthesized the results of these analyses into the five general claims presented
below and the categories of research focus in the Appendix.

2. Findings

Overall, the published research on writing from sources is characterized by a range of different but complementary
perspectives from diverse educational contexts and populationsdincluding students in secondary, undergraduate, and
graduate education writing either in their first and/or second languagesdthrough research studies of varying, but mostly
moderate, quality. The methods of data collection have been diverse, involving (either separately or in combination) ob-
servations, questionnaires, discourse-based interviews, quasi-experiments (mostly training studies, of both short and long
duration), logs or journals, think-aloud protocols, text analyses (of students' texts and of source texts), or case studies (of
individuals, courses, or tasks either in a single context or longitudinally). Because of the diversity of complementary methods
of data collection and analyses across and also within most of the studies, we decided to group the studies by the researchers'
primary foci of analysis rather than to itemize these methods of data collection separately from the researchers' purposes.
These foci have either been on: students' writing processes (12 studies), learners' task representations (13 studies), learners'
characteristics and development (13 studies), task types and differences (11 studies), characteristics of source texts (4
studies), or instruction and learning (16 studies). Most of the studies, however, combined two or even three of these purposes
together, so these tallies and categorizations in the Appendix represent our interpretations of the dominant, but not exclusive,
focus of each study.
The Appendix summarizes these foci for the 69 publications we reviewed along with the number of participants in each
study, its location, students' educational level(s) and language(s), and our evaluations of the relative quality of each research
study. Most of the research involved undergraduate university students (39 studies), but distinct numbers involved graduate
students (12 studies), undergraduate and graduate students together (6 studies), or students in secondary schools (12
studies), and one study compared students in secondary schools to students in undergraduate university programs. Many
publications involved students writing in a second language (29 studies), but an almost equal number involved students
writing in their first language (26), and 14 studies involved participants who were writing either in a first or second language.
Mixed research methods featured in most of the publications, so few demarcations appeared between ideologically quali-
tative or quantitative approaches to inquiry. Nonetheless, crudely, we could observe that slightly more than half of the studies
had some kind of quasi-experimental design (e.g., pre-post measurements, contrasting task conditions, systematic in-
terventions, control or comparison groups, etc.), and the other half were either short- or long-term case studies in natural
situations of writing, learning, and/or teaching.
50 A. Cumming et al. / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 23 (2016) 47e58

The research as a whole has investigated and illuminates a variety of multi-faceted, interrelated factors integral to learning
and teaching writing from sources in educational settings. We understand the following five claims to be supported by the
research collectively and its empirical evidence.

2.1. Claim 1: students experience difficulties with, but develop certain strategies to deal with, the complex processes of writing from
sources

Studies of the processes of composing have provided detailed accounts of the complex cognitive skills needed to write
effectively from sources, building on foundational precedents established in previous decades for English as a first language
(Hidi & Anderson, 1986; Kintsch, 1990; Spivey, 1990) and then extended to a second language (Campbell, 1990; Cumming,
Rebuffot, & Ledwell, 1989; Johns & Mayes, 1990). Most of the research (39 studies or 57% of the publications we reviewed)
has described these skills in a comprehensive way, documenting relevant behaviours empirically, while acknowledging that it
is difficult to distinguish developmental from compensatory strategies. Ruiz-Funes (2001) and Yang and Shi (2003), for
instance, documented students' sequences of planning, writing, revising, and editing texts as well as thinking processes of
synthesizing, commenting on, monitoring, structuring, and elaborating ideas. Plakans (2010) verified and expanded on these
descriptions by categorizing them as interacting cognitive processes of organizing, selecting, connecting, monitoring, and
handling language difficulties (particularly for students writing in a second language). Beaufort (2004) usefully outlined the
multidimensional mental complexities of writing from sources, explaining why they require extended practice, and may be
within a student's grasp some of, but not all of, the time: There are “five knowledge domains that writers must draw upon e
discourse community knowledge, subject matter knowledge, genre knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, and writing process
knowledge” (Beaufort, 2004, p. 136). Li (2013) likewise documented, within the framework of activity theory, the ongoing
tensions, contradictions, and strategies students need to resolve as they write course papers from sources.
Given these challenges, a commonly documented phenomenon is that students tend to interpret (from written in-
structions, teachers, or course or research assignments) tasks that involve writing from sources in different ways, thereby
engaging in different composing processes and producing different types and qualities of written texts (Allen, 2004;
McCulloch, 2013; Ruiz-Funes, 2001; Wolfersberger, 2013). Individual differences in writing from sources inevitably arise
because of the challenges inherent in knowing what and how much to focus on, selecting which sources to use, what to cite
and not to cite and how, how to establish the relevance and authority of sources, how to achieve diverse purposes, express
one's own views, select between source ideas easily or poorly understood, resolve contradictions, and so forth (Shi, 2010,
2011, 2012a, 2012b; Allen, 2004; McCarthy Young & Leinhardt, 1998; Petric & Harwood, 2013; Thompson, Morton, &
Storch, 2013). Wette (2010, p. 158) succinctly observed that “students had difficulties comprehending complexities in
texts, summarizing propositional content accurately, and integrating citations with their own voices and positions.” Hirvela
and Du (2013, p. 96) elaborated further on the difficult positions of students who
lacked the confidence and motivation necessary to trust themselves as writers in the face of seemingly superior text
produced by the original authors whose work they had read. Their response when asked to engage in knowledge
transforming was to bypass paraphrasing altogether; they retreated to the seemingly safer ground of direct quoting,
where they not only stayed true to the original meaning of the source text material, but also believed that they gained a
stronger authorial voice vicariously by association with the original authors.
These challenges persist throughout academic careers, of course, as students gradually learn to become practicing
members of their relevant discourse communities. Even after instruction, a year or more of practice, and the development of
certain relevant abilities, students continue to be challenged by the sophisticated and subtle aspects of writing from
sourcesdas shown in detailed longitudinal, holistic case studies (Beaufort, 2004; Davis, 2013; McCarthy Young & Leinhardt,
1998; McCulloch, 2013; Wette, 2010; Zhu, 2005).
There do appear to be developmental processes, however. Numerous researchers have interpreted naive strategies such as
copying material or ideas directly from source texts, over-citation, direct quotations, and relying on a small number of
discourse features or rhetorical devices as useful early steps to facilitate students' language production and to scaffold their
learning and writing (Currie, 1998; Davis, 2013; Li & Casanave, 2012; Petric, 2007). McCarthy Young and Leinhardt (1998)
provided detailed accounts of two students of history who, as they gained knowledge and experience over a year of
writing and studying, progressively “moved from knowledge telling (listing period and document content as discrete in-
formation bits) to knowledge transforming (integrating content as interpreted evidence for an argument)” (p. 25) and who
“moved from presenting ideas in sequence using empty list constructors to linking them conceptually using causal and
qualifier connects” (p. 58). Keck (2014) demonstrated that students tend to copy less frequently from sources as they progress
in their university studies and develop more knowledge and effective writing strategies. Individual differences are evident,
though: Lenski and Johns (1997) identified three different stylesdsequential, spiral, or recursivedfor researching source
texts among high school students writing course assignments.

2.2. Claim 2. knowledge and experience influence students' performance in writing from sources

Students' abilities to write from sources, and the environmental expectations for their doing so, vary according to such
factors as fields or programs of study and their prior work, content knowledge, writing, and educational experiences
 A. Cumming et al. / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 23 (2016) 47e58 51

(evidenced in 17 studies or 25% of the publications we reviewed). Studies in various countries have found group differences in
their knowledge and perceptions about appropriate citation forms between university students in the arts and in sciences,
including Australia (Thompson et al., 2013), Canada (Shi, 2012a, 2012b), Japan (Rinnert & Kobayashi, 2005), and Spain
(Mateos, Villalon, Dios, & Martin, 2007). In other studies, the writing performance of certain individuals with more knowl-
edge or work or educational experience has stood them apart from less experienced students. For example, Yang and Shi
(2003) described a student whose management background uniquely helped the person to understand and generate ideas
for writing in a business course. Connor and Kramer (1995) similarly observed how three students' prior professional training
in business affected their representations of writing from sources tasks compared to others in their study. As Shi (2012b, p.
134) neatly stated, “such apparently straightforward academic literacy skills as paraphrasing or summarizing are in fact
complex and depend on one's knowledge of the content, the disciplinary nature of citation practices, and the rhetorical
purposes of using citations in a specific context of disciplinary writing.”
In a high school context, De La Paz, Ferretti, Wissinger, Yee and MacArthur (2012) found that older students (in 11th grade)
and better writers used composing strategies based on facts and evidence from documents and demonstrated the capacity to
contextualize and corroborate evidence in their arguments compared to weaker and younger students (in 8th grade). Perin,
Keselman, and Monopoli (2003) found significant correlations between students' (a) prior knowledge and general literacy
abilities and (b) the accuracy of their written summaries, but in contrast Greene (1993) failed to find hypothesized differences
between students' writing or learning from sources according to the extent of their prior knowledge of topics. Sole
, Miras,
Castells, Espino, and Minguela (2013) observed that student writers with more elaborative patterns of writing integrated
source material more fully into and produced better texts compared to students who followed a more reproductive pattern of
copying ideas from source texts without fully comprehending them. Research has consistently concluded that writing from
sources in academic contexts is a variable and complex, rather than uniformly realized, ability (Shi, 2011).
Whereas most research has investigated students writing course papers or quasi-experimental tasks, some researchers
have examined the complex scholarly practices of citations and referencing that senior students develop for writing theses.
For example, Petric (2012) found that highly rated Master's theses contained many more direct quotations than did theses
that were rated low in quality. She also documented how these students expressed various “motivations to quote directly
from sources: (a) source-related motivations (e.g., vivid expression of an idea), (b) writers' own goals (e.g., stylistic variety), (c)
external factors (e.g., lack of time), and (d) students' beliefs and fears (e.g., fear of plagiarism)” (p. 102). Petric and Harwood
(2013) usefully exemplified how one Master's level student conceived of citations in her written assignments as serving
multiple rhetorical purposes such as distinguishing or disagreeing with authors' viewpoints; defining, explaining, or justi-
fying an idea; applying concepts to her own analyses; or acknowledging or agreeing with an idea.

2.3. Claim 3. differences may appear between L1 and L2 students in their understanding and uses of sources in writing

Some studies have documented the constraints in linguistic knowledge and composing fluency that challenge second-
language students while summarizing source texts (19 studies or 28% of the publications we reviewed). Plakans and
Gebril (2012) observed effects of English proficiency on their second-language participants, finding that students writing
from sources with lower English proficiency had difficulties comprehending source texts and focussed mostly on vocabulary
and grammar while composing whereas students with higher English proficiency focused more on cohesion, content, and
rhetoric. Similarly, McDonough, Crawford, and De Vleeschauwer (2014) found, in a study published just after the scope of our
inquiry, that Thai students less proficient in English had difficulties locating main ideas in source texts, possessed inadequate
vocabulary knowledge, and had problems restructuring the ideas in source text sentences, leading them to use a compen-
satory strategy of frequent, short copied strings from the sources in their writing. Ascencio
n Delaney (2008) and Kim (2001)
concluded that cognitively demanding writing tasks affected, albeit minimally, students' performance in accordance with
their proficiency levels in English as a second language. Baba (2009) hypothesized that different aspects of lexical proficiency
in a second language may have a differential impact on second-language learners' summary writing, particularly their
knowledge of semantic networks and the ability to metalinguistically manipulate words, but her study found these elements
to be integrally bound within students' overall proficiency in the language and so not empirically distinguishable.
Shi (2004) found that native English-speaking students in her study tended mostly to use citations to refer to source texts
whereas Chinese-background learners of English less frequently cited the sources that they used in their writing. Keck (2006)
found second-language writers used, in summary paraphrasing tasks, significantly more “near copies” than did native English
writers, though all participants in the quasi-experiment produced about the same frequency of paraphrasesdalthough,
notably, her (2014) reanalysis of the same data showed almost all of the copying to have been produced by Asian students in
their first year of university in the USA and not by those in subsequent years. Keck (2006, p. 263) observed the challenges of
demarcating precisely between students' full paraphrases and various degrees of copying or modifying words from source
materials (cf. Campbell, 1990; Shi, 2004). Allen (2004), Connor and Kramer (1995), Yamada (2002), and Wolfersberger (2013)
each observed, in very different kinds of studies, that second-language learners had greater difficulties formulating appro-
priate task representations, demarcating their scope and intentions, and deciding on strategies for writing than did their
native English-speaking counterparts.
In contrast, T. Hyland (2009) found few differences overall between English first and second language students in their
referencing practices in a corpus of their written compositions. She concluded, like Yang and Shi (2003) and Keck (2014), that
all students seem to go through stages in their development of coherent citation practices, making it difficult to demarcate
52 A. Cumming et al. / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 23 (2016) 47e58

strategies or processes unique to reading and writing in a second language. The universal nature and challenges of learning to
write effectively from sources makes it difficult to draw absolute distinctions between the writing of first and second language
students, particularly given the small numbers of student populations and writing tasks examined to date.

2.4. Claim 4. performance in writing from sources varies by task conditions and types of texts written and read

Claim 2 has been refined into Claim 4 at the micro-level of writing tasks and texts through a variety of quasi-experimental,
naturalistic observation, text analytic, survey, and interview studies (27 studies or 39% of the publications we reviewed).
Researchers have found differences between various rhetorical types of tasks that involve writing from sources. These include
differences between summary and response essays based on the same source text (Ascencio
n Delaney, 2008), summary and
argumentative essays on the same topic (Gil, Braten, Vidal-Abarca, & Strømsø, 2010; Greene, 1993), summary and opinion
essays (Shi, 2004), writing in a restricted manner (short answers to study questions) or an extended manner (in analytic
essays) (Newell & Winograd, 1995), open-ended versus instructor-directed writing tasks (Petric & Harwood, 2013), argu-
mentative writing based on one or two source texts (Mateos, Martin, Villaon, & Luna, 2008; Plakans, 2010), and science
inquiry writing tasks from sources of variable reliability (Wiley & Voss, 1999). As observed above in respect to students'
abilities in Claim 2, numerous studies have found differences in expectations and practices for writing from sources across
academic disciplines and broadly between students' writing in the arts and in sciences (Mateos et al., 2007; Rinnert &
Kobayashi, 2005; Shi, 2012a, 2012b; Thompson et al., 2013). The genre of writing a thesis has been studied extensively
and shown to involve unique, extensive, sophisticated, and varied demonstrations of scholarly citation conventions
(Basturkmen, 2009; Harwood, 2010; Harwood & Petric, 2012; Petric, 2007, 2012; Petric & Harwood, 2013). Studies of indi-
vidual students performing various writing tasks in the natural contexts of their course assignment have all observed that the
individuals' approaches and practices for using sources differ substantially by tasks, purposes, and contexts (Davis, 2013; Li &
Casanave, 2012; McCulloch, 2013; Petric & Harwood, 2013; Zhu, 2005).
Research has also examined the characteristics of source texts to determine features that make them more or less
amenable or difficult to synthesize in writing. The factors in source texts investigated include text density (Perin et al., 2003),
schematic organization and text length (Nash, Schumacher, & Carlson, 1993; Yamada, 2002; Yu, 2009), relative readability
(Roig, 1999), relative trustworthiness (Wiley & Voss, 1999), the extent of intertext or intratext references in Website sources
(Cerdan & Vidal-Abarca, 2008), and students' interest in topics they were writing about (Boscolo et al., 2011). Strømsø, Braten,
Britt, and Ferguson (2013) found university students tended to cite most from sources that took relatively controversial
positions on a topic and to use sources in their writing that the students most trusted.

2.5. Claim 5. instruction can help students improve their uses of sources in their writing

All of the published research reporting on teaching students to improve their writing from sources (16 studies or 23% of
the publications reviewed) has concluded that instruction did help students improve their processes of composing and/or the
quality of their written texts. Evidence of achievements has mostly been through comparisons of pre-post tasksdprior to and
then after an intervention or coursedthat involved writing from sources (Boscolo et al., 2007; Cerdan & Vidal-Abarca, 2008;
Hendricks & Quinn, 2000; Kirkpatrick & Klein, 2009; Klein & Samuels, 2010; Reynolds & Perin, 2009; Segev-Miller, 2004; Shi
& Beckett, 2002; Wette, 2010; Zhang, 2013).
Several publications have documented in detail students' achievements in writing from sources over the duration of full
courses taught to whole, intact classes: Boscolo et al. (2007), Segev-Miller (2004), Wette (2010), and Zhang (2013). Apart from
the multi-faceted teaching approaches and learning activities documented in these four studies, two specific instructional
techniques have proved pedagogically successful. One approach includes various ways of prompting students to analyze sources
profoundly and to construct arguments from or about the sources, either explicitly as a pedagogical intervention or implicitly
through the progress of concerted academic studies (Chang, Sung, & Chen, 2002; De La Paz & Felton, 2010; De La Paz et al., 2012;
Kirkpatrick & Klein, 2009; Klein & Samuels, 2010; McCarthy Young & Leinhardt, 1998; Reynolds & Perin, 2009; Wiley & Voss,
1999). The other, related technique is to help students evaluate the value and reliability of information sources through
interactive learning questions or annotations on sources (Cerdan & Vidal-Abarca, 2008; Proske & Kapp, 2013; Wiley et al., 2009;
Wolfe, 2002). Researchers have also claimed that modeling exemplar texts followed by students' practice produced achieve-
ments at the levels of paraphrasing (Walker, 2008), genres (Cheng, 2008; Dovey, 2010), and referencing conventions (Hendricks
& Quinn, 2000; Petric & Harwood, 2013; cf.; Harwood, 2010). Perin (2002) found that simple task repetition (i.e., practice) had a
positive effect on students producing more writing and using ideas from source texts more effectively.

3. Discussion

The research synthesized above is sufficient to be able to assert that writing from sources: is difficult and complex but
develops strategically and progressively during academic studies; is influenced by students' knowledge and experience; may
differ by students' language, cultural, work, and educational backgrounds; varies by task conditions and types of texts written
and read; and can usefully be assisted by instruction. Although each of these claims may seem self-evident, their particular
aspects, realizations, elements, and complexities have just recently been verified by the range of empirical evidence syn-
thesized here and are only starting to be understood in ways that can inform education and learning. We have therefore used
 A. Cumming et al. / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 23 (2016) 47e58 53

the term “claim” to describe the status of our interpretations, adopting the term used in formulating the tenets of arguments
generally (Toulmin, 1953) and for asserting or interpreting the validity of scores from tests (Kane, 2013). That is, each of these
five claims presents a working, credible hypothesis to guide thinking about writing from sources, but each claim needs to be
evaluated, refined, and qualified in further research.
The scope of the research synthesized attests to universal concern over writing from sources in academic contexts. Studies
have been conducted in most parts of the world, concentrated mostly in North America and Europe, but also including
Australia, New Zealand, China, Taiwan, Japan, Egypt, and South Africa. Studies on this topic also span levels of education, from
secondary schools through to undergraduate and postgraduate education, demonstrating that learning and teaching writing
from sources is integral to education for all ages and literacy abilities from adolescence into mature adulthood. Our approach
to this synthesis is unique in bringing together research on students using first and/or second languages, domains of inquiry
which otherwise have been compartmentalized into different traditions. Common elements and issues in learning, teaching,
and task characteristics abound across both domains rather than distinguish or warrant their separation. The extent of the
published research is distributed almost equally across first and second languages, in fact, as shown in the Appendix. English
has been the language of education most frequently analyzed, but notable studies have appeared in contexts where the
dominant language of education and society is Spanish, German, Italian, Norwegian, or Mandarin.
The focus of the research has seemingly emerged from fundamental issues in educational practices and policies: How can
international students be helped to learn to write effectively for their academic courses? How can students in secondary schools
be guided to do and write about independent research from library and internet resources? What task characteristics facilitate or
constrain these processes? What knowledge and abilities are needed for writing specialized genres such as theses or for
particular fields of inquiry and reasoning such as history? A notable portion of the research has also been generated from the
efforts of a few scholars and their students who have developed programs of research on writing from sources, such as Petric and
Harwood in England, Shi in Canada, Mateos in Spain, Boscolo in Italy, and various projects on history education by De la Paz and
others in the USA. Much other research reported, however, appears to have arisen independently in diverse parts of the world.
The approaches to and quality of the research on writing from sources vary. Key insights have appeared through longi-
tudinal, holistic case studies of just one or a few individual students, quasi-experiments administering different types or
conditions of tasks to distinguish their effects on the writing of groups of students, comparisons between the performance of
matched groups of students, and self-reported efforts to teach writing from sources in a course. We found it difficult to judge
whether any one of these methodological approaches is preferable or more robust, given their great diversity and multiple
uses in different studies. One research method relatively unique to this topic has been the discourse interview, which
numerous researchers have adopted to find out students' justifications for their uses, or misuses, of sources in their own
writing or the writing of others, that is, to uncover students' own representations of writing and learning from sources.
Overall, the diverse range of types of data collection and analyses attest to the value of multiple, complementary methods of
inquiry for this topic as well as to the need to encompass interrelated aspects of curricular phenomena together: learning,
teaching, writing, reading, content, and contexts. The studies that we evaluated as being strong in their quality tended to
involve carefully designed research, multiple sources of complementary qualitative and quantitative data, prolonged
engagement with participants, and ample data and theoretical rationales for reasoned interpretations. We found most studies
here to be of medium quality, as befits their publication in refereed journals of medium status internationally.
The present body of 69 studies is not yet definitive. So what remains to be done next, in addition to evaluating and refining
our five claims in new contexts and populations? We can suggest three directions, building on and extending precedents
already established. The first is comparative, longitudinal research on a larger scale than has been previously attempted,
inquiring comprehensively and further into issues already known to be important from prior studies, such as processes of
development to write from sources over time and differences between students' abilities according to their levels of edu-
cation, fields of study, and task conditions. To this end, two authors of this article are, together with colleagues at a consortium
of universities in China, presently collecting and analyzing data from students in their first, and then their second, years of
study as English Majors (and a subsample of other majors) in Bachelors' and in Masters' programs. Analyses will compare
students' development of writing from sources over one year longitudinallydas well as between degree programs cross-
sectionallydattending to key features in students' written texts and their self-reported learning and writing strategies.
A second recommended direction is to conduct within-subject comparisons of the same people writing from sources in
their first and second languages. We were surpriseddgiven frequent discussions about the challenges that students expe-
rience learning to write in a second language and/or new academic contextdto find relatively little research that has actually
compared writing from sources among multilingual students in their first and additional languages. Such inquiry is needed to
disentangle the differential effects of language proficiency and the ability to write from sources. This gap in the research may
have arisen because of the start date of 1993 for our searches of data bases, after dogmatic approaches to contrastive rhetoric
had been questioned and its influences had diminished (Belcher, 2014; Leki, 1991). Researcher-designed within-subject
studies would be insightful and could be systematically controlled, of course, but studies in natural contexts of academic
writing in first and additional languages are needed to address the broader socio-cultural, discoursal, and identity dimensions
of writing in different languages and contexts, as Gentil (2005) and Leki (2007) have aptly demonstrated.
The third, and related, area to pursue is to conceptualize writing from sources at the multi-modal, collaborative, and macro,
societal levels in addition to the textual and micro, individual bases that have predominated to date. Writing effectively from
sourcesdlearning how to appropriate others' words and ideas appropriatelydis as inherent a dimension of learning another
language (Pennycook, 1996) as it is of learning a new academic register (Beaufort, 2004), and it may be the epitome of both in
54 A. Cumming et al. / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 23 (2016) 47e58

developed societies, knowledge-based economies, and increasing international mobility. Moreover, much writing from sources
in academic contexts currently involves multi-modal sources of informationdsuch as graphs, charts, or images (O'Halloran, Tan
& Bradley, 2016; Yu & Lin, 2014)dand interacting collaboratively with groups of others in multi-media contexts (Cho, 2016;
Storch, 2013), which warrant further investigation in addition to, and alongside, the study of students learning to use or pro-
duce conventional written texts individually. If the focus of research remains solely at a micro-level of individual performance,
text analysis, or behaviour within courses or researcher-designed tasks, then the basis for explanation cannot account for the
societal, cultural, intergroup, political, and economic factors that also facilitate and constrain learning, literacy, and teaching. As
demonstrated in Cumming (2012), education, language, and literacy studies generally need to address, analyze, and compare
diverse social forcesdminority and majority, disadvantaged and advantaged, culturally different and similar, alikedin order to
understand and explain learning, teaching, and writing practices fully and to know how to improve educational policies and
practices where they may most be needed. Almost every study synthesized here has rightly appealed to theories of in-
tertextuality, dialogism, composing processes, identity, and genre, but while operationalizing their analyses at the psychological
and linguistic level of the individual or small group rather than identifying trends or seeking explanations in respect to broad
institutional, policy, or socio-economic phenomena (cf. Dressman, Wilder, & Connor, 2005; Gentil, 2005).

Acknowledgement

Support for this research is gratefully acknowledged from graduate assistantships at the Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education to the second and third authors and a Changjiang Scholarship to the first. Preliminary results were presented at the
Academic Writing and English Language Learners Conference at St. Mary's University, Halifax; at the English Language Ed-
ucation Symposium at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in October 2014; in a Symposium on Teaching Writing in Foreign
Languages at the University of Copenhagen in September 2014; and as a Changjiang Lecture at Beijing Foreign Studies
University in May 2014. We thank participants at these forums for their questions as well as Ling Shi and Charlene Polio and
two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on initial drafts of the manuscript.

Appendix. Focus of analysis, number of participants, educational level, country, language, and quality ratings of the
research synthesized

Primary focus of analysis (coded once per Study N Educational Country Language (L1 ¼ first Research quality
study despite multiple foci in some studies) level of language; L2 ¼ second (3 ¼ strong, 2 ¼ medium,
research language) 1 ¼ weak)
Students' Writing Processes Allen (2004) 1 Undergraduate Australia English L2 2
Cerdan and 56 Undergraduate Spain Spanish L1 2
Vidal-Abarca
(2008)
Hyland (2009) 125 Undergraduate Canada English L1, L2 2
Lenski and 6 Secondary USA English L1 1
Johns (1997)
Li (2013) 3 Undergraduate China English L2 2
Li and Casanave 2 Undergraduate China English L1 3
(2012)
McCulloch 2 Graduate UK English L2 2
(2013)
Plakans and 145 Undergraduate Egypt English L2 3
Gebril (2012)
Ruiz-Funes 1 Undergraduate USA Spanish L2 2
(1999)
Sole
et al. (2013) 10 Secondary Spain Spanish L1 2
Thompson et al. 13 Undergraduate Australia English L2 2
(2013)
Yang and Shi 6 Graduate Canada English L2 2
(2003)
Students' Task Representations Connor and 5 Graduate USA English L1, L2 2
Kramer (1995)
Harwood and 2 Graduate UK English L2 2
Petric (2012)
McCarthy and 5 Secondary USA English L1 2
Leinhardt
(1998)
Petric (2012) 16 Graduate Hungary English L2 2
Petric and 1 Graduate UK English L2 2
Harwood
(2013)
Plakans (2010) 10 Undergraduate, USA English L2 2
Graduate
 A. Cumming et al. / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 23 (2016) 47e58 55

(continued )

Primary focus of analysis (coded once per Study N Educational Country Language (L1 ¼ first Research quality
study despite multiple foci in some studies) level of language; L2 ¼ second (3 ¼ strong, 2 ¼ medium,
research language) 1 ¼ weak)
Rinnert and 715 Undergraduate, Japan English L2, L1 2
Kobayashi Graduate
(2005)
Ruiz-Funes 14 Undergraduate USA Spanish L2 2
(2001)
Shi (2011) 48 Undergraduate, Canada English L1, L2 2
Graduate
27 Instructors Canada English L1, L2
Shi (2012a) 48 Undergraduate, Canada English L1, L2 2
Graduate
27 Instructors Canada English L1, L2
Shi (2012b) 48 Undergraduate, Canada English L1, L2 2
Graduate
27 Instructors Canada English L1, L2
Strømsø et al. 18 Undergraduate Norway English L2 2
(2013)
Wolfersberger 4 Undergraduate NZealand English L2 3
(2013)
Students' Characteristics, Abilities, and Ascencio
n 139 Undergraduate, USA English L1, L2 3
Development Delaney (2008) Graduate
Baba (2009) 68 Undergraduate Japan English L2 2
Beaufort (2004) 1 Undergraduate USA English L1 3
Currie (1998) 1 Undergraduate Canada English L2 2
Davis (2013) 3 Graduate UK English L2 2
De La Paz et al. 93 Secondary USA English L1 2
(2012)
Hirvela and Du 2 Undergraduate USA English L2 2
(2013)
Keck (2006) 165 Undergraduate USA English L1, L2 3
Kim (2001) 70 Undergraduate Korea English L2 1
Mateos et al. 171 Undergraduate Spain Spanish L1 2
(2007)
Mateos and Sole
45 Secondary, Spain Spanish L1 2
(2009) Undergraduate
Petric (2007) 16 Graduate Hungary English L2 2
Zhu (2005) 1 Graduate USA English L2 1
Task Types and Differences Boscolo et al. 247 Secondary Italy Italian L1 3
(2011)
Gil et al. (2010) 87 Undergraduate Spain Spanish L1 3
Greene (1993) 15 Undergraduate USA English L1 2
Mateos et al. 9 Secondary Spain Spanish L1 1
(2008)
Nash et al. 84 Undergraduate USA English L1 1
(1993)
Newell and 63 Secondary USA English L1 2
Winograd
(1995)
Proske and 48 Undergraduate Germany German L1 2
Kapp (2013)
Shi (2004) 87 Undergraduate Canada English L1, L2 2
China
Shi (2010) 16 Undergraduate Canada English L1, L2 2
Wiley and Voss 64 Undergraduate USA English L1 3
(1999)
Yamada (2002) 27 Undergraduate Japan English L2 1
Characteristics of Source Texts Perin et al. 209 Undergraduate USA English L1, L2 2
(2003)
Roig (1999) 421 Undergraduate USA English L1 1
Wolfe (2002) 122 Undergraduate USA English L1 2
Yu (2009) 157 Undergraduate China English L2 3
Instruction and Learning Boscolo et al. 52 Undergraduate Italy Italian L1 2
(2007)
Chang et al. 126 Secondary Taiwan Mandarin L1 2
(2002)
Cheng (2008) 1 Graduate USA English L2 2
De La Paz and 160 Secondary USA English L1 2
Felton (2010)
Dovey (2010) 170 Graduate Australia English L1, L2 1
(continued on next page)
56 A. Cumming et al. / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 23 (2016) 47e58

(continued )

Primary focus of analysis (coded once per Study N Educational Country Language (L1 ¼ first Research quality
study despite multiple foci in some studies) level of language; L2 ¼ second (3 ¼ strong, 2 ¼ medium,
research language) 1 ¼ weak)
Hendricks and 6 Undergraduate S. Africa English L2 2
Quinn (2000)
Kirkpatrick and 83 Secondary Canada English L1 2
Klein (2009)
Klein and 60 Secondary Canada English L1 2
Samuels (2010)
Perin (2002) 141 Undergraduate USA English L1, L2 1
Reynolds and 121 Secondary Canada English L1, L2 3
Perin (2009)
Segev-Miller 24 Graduate Israel English L2 2
(2004)
Shi and Beckett 23 Undergraduate Canada English L2 2
(2002)
Walker (2008) 36 Undergraduate USA English L1 2
Wette (2010) 87 Undergraduate NZealand English L2 1
Wiley et al. 60 Undergraduate USA English L1 3
(2009)
Zhang (2013) 29 Undergraduate USA English L2 2

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Alister Cumming is a professor in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and for 2013 to 2016 also a Changjiang Scholar at
Beijing Foreign Studies University. His research and teaching focus on writing in second languages, language assessment, language program evaluation and
policies, and research methods.

Conttia Lai, currently a PhD student and part-time English instructor at the University of Toronto, taught and studied previously at the University of Hong
Kong.

noa and Kwangwoon University,

Hyeyoon Cho, currently a PhD student at the University of Toronto, studied previously at the University of Hawai'i at Ma
Korea and taught at Ubon Ratchathani University, Thailand.