PERSPECTIVES OF EFL DOCTORAL STUDENTS ON CHALLENGES OF CITATIONS IN ACADEMIC WRITING

PurposeCitation is vital in academic writing but particularly challenging for novice writers who use English as a second or foreign language. While much is known about citations types and functions, scarce knowledge is available about what makes citing a complicated procedure. Hence, this study explores the difficulties in citing and integrating information from academic sources into the literature review chapter of PhD proposals. MethodologyThe study, which falls under New Rhetoric studies, involved conducting individual discourse-based interviews with six male Arab doctoral students who were selected purposefully from the Information Technology department of a Malaysian public university. The participants’ literature review chapters were employed in a stimulated recall to retrieve their inner perceptions when writing their PhD proposals. Hand analysis, mind mapping, and visual mapping were used in the analysis of the data. Multiple codes were initially obtained and further reduced to form four major themes and several