Citation Practices of Education Student Researchers in their Undergraduate Thesis

Citation practices among expert writers and dissertations in postgraduate level have been widely investigated in scholarly community. Although recent literature have already expounded on the citation practices in the undergraduate level, few, if none, have paid attention on corpus written by education students. It is therefore the focus of this paper to present citation practices of the pre-service teachers in a teacher education institution in Southern Philippines. Discussion sections of the Chapter 4 of the thirty seven undergraduate corpuses were analyzed using the integral and non-integral citation structures employed by Luzόn (2015). Interviews were also conducted to obtain data on the grounds of their identified (problematic) citation practices. Findings reported that there was an overutilization of integral citation pattern and a great number of citation practices are indeed problematic mainly due to lack of knowledge of rhetorical citations and poor linguistic skills. Grounding from these results, we recommended that an academic writing subject be offered in the College of Education to address the pressing need for scholarly writing.