Citation Practice in the Whole TESOL Master’s Theses by Vietnamese Postgraduates

Citing previous works is an important rhetorical feature of academic writing and it is challenging for novice writers, especially non-native English writers (NNEWs). However, little is known about how NNEWs cite in each chapter of their master’s (M.A.) theses. This paper thus reports on the citation practice in 24 TESOL M.A. theses written by Vietnamese students. Citation types were first searched on the Antconc software with the use of the Regular Expressions (Regex) written for both conventional and ‘invented’ citing ways by this group of writers, and then based on Thompson and Tribble’s (2001) framework, citation functions were investigated and classified. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with thesis writers and thesis supervisors. Besides the general citation practice by this group of NNEWs, and the different citation functions and types in different chapters of their theses, the study also found that these writers were not fully aware of the significance of citations as a rhetorical device in their thesis writing, and insufficient attention was paid to the in-text citations in the TESOL discourse community in Vietnam. These findings suggest explicit instructions on citations in order to help novice writers to fully acquire the citation use.


INTRODUCTION
states that reference to the works or ideas of others has an important role in the knowledge construction.In fact, citing other works allows writers to get their research grounded, show the significance and relevance of their research, provide justifications for their arguments, and position themselves in relation to other disciplinary members.Besides its various purposes, referencing to previous research has complex syntactic variations.Swales (1986Swales ( , 1990) ) creates clear formal distinctions between integral and non-integral citation forms.The integral citations are instances where cited author(s)' name(s) appear(s) as a part of the reporting sentence while the non-integral ones are references in which the author(s)' name(s) have no syntactic function, but they are referred to in parentheses or by numbers.Integral or non-integral citations are used to show writers' emphasis on cited authors or reported messages, respectively (Swales 1990).Acquiring the skills for appropriate and effective use of citations thus helps writers to successfully integrate other people's words and ideas into their writing and presents their study persuasively (White 2004).
Despite the important roles of citations in academic writing and in students' academic accomplishment, few studies have been conducted on how citations are used in M.A. theses, especially those written by NNEWs (Jalilifar 2012, Jalilifar & Dabbi 2012, Petri! 2007).In their studies of citations used by Iranian students in the M.A. introduction chapters, Jalilifar and Dabbi (2012) found that these students preferred the integral citations in which the name of the researcher appears in the subject position (verb controlling citation) in order to strengthen their claims within the text.Moreover, these Iranian M.A. students tend to report previous research rather than evaluate it, by simply summarizing it and integrating it into their study.These writers' lack of critical evaluation is attributed to Iranian cultures in which indirectness is valued (Jalilifar & Dabbi 2012).Based on the categories of rhetorical functions of citations proposed by Thompson (2001), Petri! (2007) examined the intentions writers of low-graded and high-graded M.A. theses in Gender studies realized by using citations, and she proposed a specific typology for citation practices used in this field.Besides this study, Petri! (2012) studied the use of direct quotations between low-rated and high-rated M.A. theses written by L2 students from Central and Eastern Europe through her textual analysis and in-depth semi-structured interviews.Her textual analysis, which employed Borg's (2000) taxonomy, revealed that writers of high-rated theses quoted directly almost three times more frequently than low-rated thesis writers.This finding contradicts the common belief in the literature that overuse of direct quotations is commonly associated with less successful writing.However, she indicated that this is because the writers of low-rated theses relied on clause-based quotations that can be easily incorporated into their texts.Highrated theses, in contrast, used quotation fragments, showing their greater effort exerted on the incorporation of the borrowed materials.
In their study of textual borrowing practices, Flowerdew and Li (2007) and Li (2007) found that students' citations involve a certain level of language re-use (i.e.passages were pasted from source materials).In their study of the citations used in the literature review (LR) chapters of Ph.D. dissertations written by English native speakers and Spanish native counterparts, Soler-Monreal and Gil-Salom (2012) reported that citation behaviors reflect the cultural differences.In particular, when compared with English writers, the Spanish tended to avoid personal confrontation and mitigate the strength of their arguments through their use of non-integral citations in passive and impersonal structures.A recent study employing a move-related approach to examine citation functions in 16 Discussion sections of Biology research articles (RAs) and M.A. theses (8 each) was conducted by Samraj (2013).However, unlike Mansourizadeh and Ahmad's (2011) claim on a less sophisticated and complex use of citations by Malaysian students than RA writers, Samraj found a similar way of using citations in terms of their rhetorical functions between M.A. theses and RAs, and she accounted this disconformity for the different disciplines and length of the texts in her corpus and those in the counterpart.Samraj (2013), in addition, showed how citations are involved in the construction of the move-step structures in order to achieve the rhetorical purposes of each Discussion section/chapter of a RA/thesis.Similarly, Chen and Kuo (2012) stated that citations in M.A. theses seem to perform different rhetorical functions in different chapters.Although these studies have provided some insights into the way NNEWs cite in their theses and in their first writing for publication, they have not been systematically documented since no study has been investigated on how citations are used in the thesis by NNEWs.Moreover, little is known about the way students cite in each chapter of their M.A. theses although they are considered as a high stakes genre of a student's academic accomplishment (Hyland 2004).The current study, which aims to investigate the use of citations in each chapter of their M.A. theses, therefore, is expected to add more information about students' use of citation to the literature and to shed more light on how NNEWs cite in their theses.
Given their significance and potential challenges in academic writing, citations have not been formally taught to TESOL M.A. students in Vietnam.In fact, these writers were provided with the list of conventions of the APA citation style and they themselves had to figure out how to cite the previous studies in their texts.However, Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) emphasise that due to various purposes of citation uses, novice writers cannot fully learn crucial citation practices from their mere reading of the instructions.Moreover, Pecorari (2006) also states that citation is an 'occluded' feature, and there tends to be an existing gap between what is prescribed and what is practiced in students' writing.Thompson and Tribble (2001), in addition, assert that in textbooks for English for Academic Purposes, few explicit instructions on how to cite in a specific discipline are given although there is an emphasis on the surface features of citations, such as quotation, summary and paraphrasing.Furthermore, like the situation described in Jalilifar (2012), the ways Vietnamese M.A. students in the TESOL discourse community cite previous studies would be of secondary concern as supervisors know that in the defense session, their supervisees' deployment of citation is not judged by the thesis examiners.Hence, this study aims to explore how these Vietnamese M.A. students deployed citations in each chapter of their theses.In particular, this research plans to answer two questions: 1) How citations are used in the TESOL M.A. theses by Vietnamese postgraduate students?2) What are the citation types and their functions used in different chapters of theses written by this group of writers in Vietnam?
The answers to these questions are expected to provide an insightful description of how citations are practiced in the TESOL discourse community in Vietnam and to add to the existing knowledge of how NNEWs cite in their theses.

DATA ANALYSIS
The data consist of 24 out of 96 electronic TESOL M.A. theses written by Vietnamese students during the years 2009 to 2012.They were randomly obtained with the writers' consent from all three universities providing this M.A. program (eight from each) in the South of Vietnam.To create a corpus, each thesis was randomly coded from T1-T24 for the ease of reference and the anonymity of the thesis writers.Each chapter of these theses was then copied and pasted onto a separate file and they were also randomly coded from 1 to 24 (I1-I24 for Introductions, LR1-LR24 for LR chapters).The resulting corpus of 24 theses consisted of 490,666 words (an average of 77 pages each).

FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSING CITATION TYPES AND FUNCTIONS
Due to its comprehensiveness in terms of the combination of both the syntactic position and semantic function of a citation, Thompson and Tribble's (2001, pp. 95-96) framework was chosen as the instrument to analyse the citation types and functions in this thesis corpus.Integral citations in their classification are divided into three categories: 1. Verb controlling: The citation acts as the agent that controls a lexical verb, in active or passive voice, as in: Davis and Olson (1985) define a management information system as... 2. Naming: The citation is a noun phrase or part of a noun phrase used to signify a method, formulation or someone's work instead of a human agent, as in: Typical price elasticities of demand for poultry products in Canada, Germany and the UK are shown in Harling and Thompson (1983).

Non-citation:
The citation is a reference to another writer but the name is given without a year reference because the reference has been supplied earlier in the text and the writer avoids repeating it, as in: The "classical" form of the disease, described by Marek, causes significant mortality losses.
Non-integral citations are classified as follows: 1.Source: This citation indicates where the idea or information is taken from Citation is central... it can provide justification for arguments (Gilbert 1976).2. Identification: It identifies an agent within a sentence it refers to A simulation model has therefore been developed … (Potts 1980).3. Reference: This type of citation is usually signaled by the inclusion of the directive "see".
DFID has changed its policy recently with regard to ELT (see DFID 1998).4. Origin: This citation indicates the originator of a concept, technique, or product.
The software package used was Wordsmith Tools (Scott 1996).

PROCEDURES FOR CITATION ANALYSIS
Citation types were searched on the Antconc concordance with the use of the Regex which were written for both the conventional and 'invented' citing ways by this group of writers.In fact, it was found that this group of Vietnamese writers had their own citing ways, especially in citing Vietnamese scholars.In order to capture all citations included in the corpus, the researchers scanned through all the texts, noted their 'invented' citing ways, and then new Regex were subsequently created if their 'invented' citing ways had been found in the corpus.
The key word 'cited' was also employed in searching for the citation types because a number of secondary citations were noticed.Based on Thompson and Tribble's (2001) framework and with a careful investigation on the context of each citation shown in the concordance lines, the citation types and functions were carefully classified.However, for identifying citation types, Hyland's (2000) criteria were followed.That is, after the first citation was counted, each occurrence of another author's name was counted as one citation, regardless of whether or not it is followed by the year of publication.In addition, in cases where more than one work was cited for a particular statement, only one instance was counted because the count indicates that a citation has been made, but not whether it is a single or a multiple reference citation (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad 2011).Moreover, expressions which did not point to a specific author or source, such as 'some authors' or 'Marxists' were ignored (Hyland 2002).

RELIABILITY OF CITATION ANALYSIS
First, the Regex were checked by an expert to ensure the accuracy of the search patterns.For the citation types, the researchers manually counted the citations used in each chapter and the counted number was compared with the results shown on the concordance lines (Antconc).This method of validation helped to not only check the accuracy of the Regex, but also identify the possible discrepancy between the actual number of citations and those shown in the concordance lines.Regarding citation functions, their employment in 6 theses (25%) analysed by each researcher individually was compared, yielding high inter-rater reliability rates (94%).Then, two researchers worked out the coding disagreements until a satisfactory level of coder agreement was attained.After that, the two researchers analysed citations used in the rest of the theses in the corpus.

INTERVIEW DATA
Apart from the analysis on Antconc, semi-structured interviews with six thesis writers (W1-W24) and three thesis supervisors (S1-S3) were included to provide clarifications and insightful understanding regarding unconventional aspects of citation use in writing this genre in the TESOL discourse community in Vietnam (Hyland 2000).The interviews were conducted in Vietnamese and recorded, but only the information that helped clarify the issues related to the employment of citations was translated with the aim of shedding more light on how this group of M.A. students employed citations in their theses.1, there is a great difference in the total number of citations among these 24 TESOL M.A. theses, ranging from 61 (T12) to 213 (T14) instances.It can be argued that this variation could be due to each writer's individual writing style, the availability of publications on a particular topic, and the particular research methodology adopted in a thesis project.However, in the interviews with the thesis writers and thesis supervisors, it is revealed that an average number of 50 references on the reference page are acceptable for an M.A. thesis in the TESOL discourse community in Vietnam.This information tends to suggest that more attention is paid to the total number of references at the end of a thesis rather than how they are used within its text.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
In addition to the difference in the number of in-text citations among theses, Table 1 also shows a great variation in the use of citations among chapters.In particular, citations were densely present in the LR chapters, accounting for almost 75% of citations in the current thesis corpus (Table 2), followed by those in Introduction and Methodology chapters, with a relatively equal percentage of 8.5%.In the interviews with six thesis writers, it is interesting to know that LR chapters were believed to be the only place where citations should be present.Moreover, it is surprising to know from two thesis writers (W17 and W23) that citations were not required in the other chapters of a thesis.As can be seen in Excerpt 1, this writer was likely to be unaware of the rhetorical functions of citations in other thesis chapters, but relied on previous theses which she considered as good models for her use of citations in her thesis.
(Excerpt 1) "…I think references to previous studies should be present in LR chapters, not in the others because from my observation, few citations were found in the other chapters of previous theses…" (W23) This interview information tends to confirm the claims made by Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) and Pecorari (2006) that it is difficult for students to implicitly acquire citation conventions, and explicit instructions on citations should, therefore, be provided.
The concluding chapters (Results, Discussions, combined Results-Discussions and Conclusions) of these TESOL M.A. theses, on the other hand, contained a few citations (around 3% each).In fact, as seen in Table 1, nearly half of the current Results, Discussion, combined Results-Discussion and Conclusion chapters did not refer to any prior studies, and these concluding chapters have an average of 2, 6, 7 and 4 citations per chapter, respectively.In the interviews with six thesis writers, they all admitted that they did not know the necessity of citations in these concluding chapters, as can be seen in Excerpts 2, 3 and 4 below.
(Excerpt 2) "…why are citations necessary in Results chapters?I think only the findings are presented in these chapters…." (W14) (Excerpt 3) "…I had no idea about using them in the Discussion and my supervisor did not mention about using them in these chapters except in the literature review" (W6) (Excerpt 4) "From my understanding, writers are required to discuss or talk about what they have found, not the others' works in Discussion chapters.And one more reason, I was afraid to get out of track if I cited a lot in these chapters" (W22) This finding reflects these novice writers' lack of knowledge about the rhetorical significance of citations in relation to the communicative purpose of each thesis chapter (Kwan & Chan, 2014;Samraj, 2013).However, as revealed in the interviews with three thesis supervisors, although these M.A. students were advised to make use of references in these last chapters, they did not use them due to their lack of explicit instructions on the citing practice.Furthermore, thesis supervisor 2 (S2) added that due to thesis writers' busy schedule (teaching and studying at the same time), their last chapters were not adequately invested.Although this issue is common between Ph.D. and M.A. novice writers in Asia as stated by Low, Phoon, Petras, and Mohamad (2013) in their study of Asian novice writers' problems and mistakes in research writing, the presence of a few citations in the TESOL concluding chapters tends to render the findings of these studies as being grounded in the literature.In fact, it is in these last chapters of the theses where findings are presented and citations are needed to justify the findings, to safeguard their claims, and to gain readers' acceptance.However, the infrequent use of citations found in the concluding chapters of this thesis corpus could also reflect the lack of a competitive environment for delivery or publication in Vietnam.As Harwood (2009) states, the place where authors get their works published has an impact on citation use.In Vietnam, after the thesis defense, revised theses are submitted to the libraries of their universities and a degree is awarded without any requirement for conference presentations or publication.Besides this practice, the insufficiency of reference resources in the TESOL discourse community in Vietnam would be another possible explanation for the infrequent citation use.In fact, the majority of references identified in this thesis corpus are from old books and previous M.A. theses of Vietnamese students, and almost none is from international journals.Moreover, among 2,704 citations employed in these 24 theses, 208 instances (7.69%) made use of secondary sources for both integral and non-integral citations.In the interviews with six thesis writers and all three supervisors, they admitted that the resources of references at the libraries of their universities are limited to old books and previous students' theses.Indeed, only one out of the three universities with this M.A. TESOL program in the South of Vietnam has recently subscribed to databases which provide access to newspapers and scholarly journals outside Vietnam.M 5 9 3 1 2 2 7 9 7 1 1 8 6 1 0 2 4 2 7 9 3 0 2 2 2 1 1 0 6 9 2 4 7 2 3 5 2 1 0 8 3 3 6 6 8 7 6 2 3 4 2 1 2 3 3 R 1 3 5 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 3 0 3 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 6 D 3 2 3 1 0 0 0 0 4 0 0 0 0 1 2 0 1 2 3 0 0 0 0 6 1 5 2 2 0 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 5 2 0 0 4 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8 1 R -D 0 0 0 0 6 3 0 0 0 0 6 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 3 9 2 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 5 0 5 3 2 2 0 0 4 3 0 0 0 0 3 2 1 0 2 0 7 5 C 2 1 3 4 1 9 1 0 0 0 0 0 4 3 2 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 5 1 0 0 0 0 2 1 0 0 4 3 1 1 5 1 2 2 0 0 1 0 3 2 4 2 7 1 9 8  Despite the variations in the citation types among the 24 TESOL M.A. theses of the current corpus and their chapters, integral citations were found to be almost twice more prominent than non-integral ones (Table 2).This tendency in using citations by this group of Vietnamese writers is likely to reflect the preferred citation type by non-native M.A. students in Applied Linguistics.In fact, like these Vietnamese M.A. students, Iranian M.A. students employed five times more integral citations than non-integral ones in their thesis introduction chapters (Jalilifar 2012, Jalilifar & Dabbi 2012).Moreover, this finding conforms to the trend in using citations in the soft disciplines (Hyland 2000, Maroko 2013, Okamura 2008).Charles (2006) also confirms that the use of integral or non-integral citations is partly influenced by genres and disciplines.As found by Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011), nonintegral citations were favored over integral ones by both expert and novice Malaysian writers in the field of chemical engineering (the hard discipline) in Malaysia, despite their being non-native.However, it is interesting to learn from the interviews with the actual thesis writers (W11, W14 and W17) that more integral citations were used because they were asked to paraphrase the cited sources rather than to quote them in the non-integral ones (Excerpt 5).Their supervisors also admitted that these Vietnamese writers tended to copy the language of the original sources in non-integral citations, so they kept asking them to paraphrase them by using integral ones (Excerpt 6).
(Excerpt 5) "…for me, integral citations were used because my supervisor asked me to paraphrase the sources rather than to use the language of the previous writers.So in my thesis, the integral ones were my words, and the non-integral ones were my quotations."(W11) (Excerpt 6) "…these students preferred to use quotations.And if my students often quoted and put the names of previous researchers in brackets, I would ask them to paraphrase and summarize the cited sources or provide them reference books for them to learn citations by themselves" (S3) Although it could be argued that these students' citation practice characterises students' citation employment and is sufficient for them to their familiarity with the knowledge in the field (Jalilifar & Dabbi 2012, Petri! 2007), a closer look at their texts in which two citation types were equally employed revealed that they were inexperienced in using citations.As shown in Example 1 below, integral and non-integral citations were separately used in different paragraphs reviewing different aspects of the research topic.Moreover, the writer simply summarised and integrated previous studies as a list of findings, without any subjective interpretation.Such a separate and descriptive nature of citing previous studies identified in a majority of the current thesis corpus by these Vietnamese M.A. students could indicate that they were aware of using these two citation types in their texts, but they were inadequately familiar with functions that each citation form serves.This finding tends to confirm the claim by Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) that NNEWs cannot fully learn crucial citation practices through their mere reading of the guidelines.
(Example 1) The main objective of English language education…! to teach students to read English books (Wei 2005).However, reading involves a variety of factors, which.... Some of these factors are: learners' lack of target language proficiency and vocabulary (Kasper 1993), unfamiliarity with the content and/or formal schemata of the texts to be read (Carrell and Floyd 1987) and inefficient reading strategies )Carrell 1989)… (I11) In a review of the developments in second language reading research, Grabe (1991) pointed out that….. Levine, Ferenz andReves (2000, p.1) stated that…... Shuyun andMunby (1996) noted that …. (I11)

CITATION FUNCTIONS
In terms of citation functions, this study found that citations performed different rhetorical functions in different thesis chapters as indicated by Chen and Kuo (2012) (Table 2).First, more Naming than Verb Controlling functions were present in the Methodology, Results, Discussion and combined Results-Discussion chapters while the latter was more predominant in the Introduction, LR and Conclusions.This finding can be explained in relation to the rhetorical purposes of these chapters in a thesis.First, Verb controlling should be more prominent in the Introduction and LR chapters because its emphasis is placed on previous researchers who construct factual reliability and define a specific context of knowledge or problem to which the current work contributes (Hyland 2002).Moreover, Hyland (2002) emphasises that through the use of Verb controlling, the current work is embedded in the community-generated literature and this literature is employed to create the niche for the current study.In the Conclusion chapters, citations are employed in order to justify the comparisons, evaluations and the new claims that have been made in their respective Results and Discussion chapters.Such justifications on the research findings could be easily accepted if they are made through the voice and the views of prior researchers whose names are placed within the citing sentences in the integral Verb controlling citations.References to previous studies in the Method chapters, on the other hand, aim to focus on the previous research works rather than previous researchers; hence, more Naming functions are present.Similarly, their communicative purposes of the Results chapters could explain the prominent presence of Naming functions.As indicated in the move-step structure of the Results chapters in M.A. theses by Chen and Kuo (2012), writers can indicate methods used and statistical procedures applied (Move 1) and compare the findings with those in the literature, besides evaluating the strengths and limitations of the results and providing explanations for the findings (Move 3).The presence of these steps indicates that previous works of the cited authors rather than the cited authors' names are employed in the Results chapters.In their corresponding Discussion chapters, moreover, a relatively higher proportion of Naming indicates that in addition to the comparisons made between findings of the reported study and those in the literature (Naming), the writers almost equally used previous researchers whose names were placed as the subject of the reporting verbs (Verb controlling) in order to argue for the value of their research findings.In the combined Results-Discussion chapters, a relatively higher proportion of Naming used by this group of Vietnamese writers indicates that the findings of previous cited researchers and not the researchers were also employed to make comparisons and evaluations, and to provide explanations for the findings of the reported study.
Another finding which shows citations perform differently in different thesis chapters is the presence of almost two thirds of Naming in the LR chapters, followed by those in the Method ones (14%).A possible explanation for this could be due to their communicative purposes.As mentioned earlier, citations are employed in the LR chapters to serve as a justification and a consolidation of the value of the reported research.In other words, LR chapters need to show what is distinct from what has been done in the literature.Hence, previous research methods and findings are reviewed in detail to avoid possible flaws in this study (Kwan 2006).Similarly, methods employed and statistical procedures applied are the foci of the Method chapters.Close inspection of Naming citations in the current thesis corpus in the concordance lines revealed that among 567 instances, 255 (45%) followed the pattern 'According to X (year)' and the rest was constructed in noun phrases like 'by X (year', 'from X' (year', 'in X's (year', 'of X (year)' and 'for X (year)'.This finding indicates that 'According to X (year)' was the preferred pattern in Naming by this group of non-native writers and a limited number of structures was used for this citation function.
Third, Origin was found in the LR, Methodology and Results chapters, and there was a complete absence of this Non-integral citation function in the other chapters.The different communicative purposes of each thesis chapter could account for this disparity.In the LR chapters, Origin was mainly used to indicate the originator of a concept or a term as can be seen in Example 2 below.References to previous studies in the Method chapters, on the other hand, aim to focus on the previous research works rather than previous researchers; hence Origin function was the most frequently employed.In fact, citing previous studies in the Method chapters is to provide support or justification for the methodology utilized to conduct the study to answer research questions after it has been reviewed, abstracted or synthesised in the LR chapters (Chen & Kuo 2012).As can be seen in Examples 3a-b, the former indicates the originators (MacMillan & Schumacher) of the research design whilst the latter shows where the proposition of the statement is taken from.These references help justify the chosen research tools and instruments as appropriate and reliable ones since they have been developed and their effectiveness was confirmed by previous researchers.
(Example 2) The relationship between language and culture has been widely investigated and confirmed by many researchers.This is proved by the fact that many new words have been coined to reflect this strong relationship: linguaculture (Kramsch,1989, Fantini 1995), languaculture (Agar 1994), language-culture (Galisson 1991), language-andculture (Byram & Morgan 1993 However, unlike their use in the Method chapters in indicating the originator of the adopted method and the source of the cited proposition, Origin citations in the Results chapters show that references to previous studies by these Vietnamese writers are for methods and statistical procedures applied (Move 1) rather than for commenting on results (Move 3) (Example 4).
(Example 4) This question consists of nine items, eight of which are possible objectives of culture teaching provided; one is an open-ended item …. .These eight objectives were adopted from the CULTNET project (Sercu et al. 2005) and Han's research (Han 2009). (R1) Different from the LR, Method and Results chapters in which up to three non-integral citation functions were found, the non-integral citations in these Discussion chapters had a single function, Source (Table 2).As defined by Thompson and Tribble (2001), this nonintegral citation function indicates where the idea or information is taken from.In fact, as can be seen in Example 5a below, the proposition by the previous authors was used as support and justifications for the writers' findings.Although the presence of this single non-integral citation function, Source, was found in the Introduction, combined Results-Discussion and Conclusion chapters of this M.A. thesis corpus, it was mainly used to list the topics of the previous research in order for the niche of the reported studies to be established in the Introductions (Example 5b).In the Results-Discussion chapters, in contrast, these writers integrated previous researchers' propositions into their text in providing support for their findings (Example 5c) while justifying their suggestions for teaching is its main function in these Conclusion chapters (Example 5d).The different rhetorical functions of these chapters in theses could attribute to the change in the ways these writers employed this Source function.Moreover, the predominance of this non-integral Source function across the chapters of these 24 theses confirms Petric's (2007) claim that this citation function is nonnative M.A. students' most favorite in the non-integral types.Its sufficient potential in displaying the M.A. students' knowledge and familiarity with the literature could be attributed to its most frequent use in these Vietnamese students' writing of their M.A theses.Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011), furthermore, confirm that attributing is the single citation purpose used by non-native novice writers in their academic writing.
(Example 5a) … These difficulties may drive VTE and NET to focus more on language knowledge and skills than cultural/intercultural awareness in their ELT.This is true as it was discovered that difficult conditions and heavy workloads have a powerful impact on the pedagogical decision that teachers make (Crooks & Arakaki 1998).
(D1) (Example 5b) In Vietnam, it is known that there have been many studies done on teaching and learning vocabulary recently; for instance, the use of games in teaching vocabulary (Nguyen, Vu Thuy Tien,2006& Huynh, Huu Hanh Nguyen 2007), the effectiveness of applying computer aids in teaching vocabulary (Pham, Thi Thuy Van 2006), an investigation on vocabulary learning strategies of English majors (Huynh, Thi Bich Van 2007) Besides the different distributions of citation functions in each chapter, Verb controlling and Source are the two most common functions used in the integral and nonintegral citation types, 39.6% and 34.25%, respectively.Although the employment of nonintegral Source is reported to be sufficient for M.A. students to display their knowledge in the field (Petri! 2007) and to describe novice writers' awareness of the literature (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad 2011), the predominant use of integral Verb controlling citations was reported in the interviews with actual thesis writers (W11, W14, W17, and W23) that they paraphrased rather than quoted previous studies.Such information from the interviews indicates that these thesis writers might not fully know the rhetorical functions of this citing device when they employed it.Additionally, although applying limited citation functions by M.A. students is reported to be due to their not being at an appropriate stage of linguistic or intellectual development (Charles 2006, Hyland 1999, Petri! 2007), their preference for only two citation functions may be indicative of their less proficient knowledge of citation use.
Finally, integral Non-citation and non-integral Origin citation functions were found around 2.5% of all citations in this M.A. thesis corpus whereas there was an absence of nonintegral Identification and Reference functions.While few instances of integral Non-citation indicated that very few further discussions on the previously mentioned author/work were provided by this group of Vietnamese writers, the absence of Identification and Reference in the non-integral citations in this corpus is likely to indicate these Vietnamese writers' unfamiliarity with these functional features of citations.As stated by Pecorari (2006), these citation functions could be "occluded" to them.However, Yeh (2012) indicates that less experienced students are less capable of articulating subtle citation functions, perhaps due to their insufficient training and language proficiency although they notice the different citation patterns in their readings.In addition to these findings, the presence of grammatical mistakes (Example 7), long web-links (Example 8) and inconsistencies of citing certain Vietnamese scholars (Example 5b above) found in the current thesis corpus suggests these thesis writers' linguistic deficiency and an insufficient attention paid to the citing practice of these thesis writers in the TESOL discourse community in Vietnam.In fact, the interview with the actual thesis writer (W23) revealed that no criticism or comments were made on her inclusion of long web-links in the thesis (Excerpt 7).Moreover, three supervisors from all three universities where the current thesis corpus was collected emphasised that citations were not their focus in supervising M.A. students, as can be seen in Excerpt 8 below.The information from the interviews with both thesis writers and supervisors points out that citations are not paid due attention to in the Vietnamese TESOL discourse community.More attention, therefore, should be paid to how NNEWs cite and explicit instructions on citations should also be provided to them in order to raise their awareness of various rhetorical functions of citations.It is argued that proper citation uses will enable novice writers to acculturate into their disciplinary discourse.

CONCLUSION
This paper reported the findings on the citation practice and citation types and functions used in each chapter of 24 TESOL M.A. theses written by Vietnamese postgraduates by employing Thompson and Tribble's (2001) framework.Although this study confirmed the claim by Chen and Kuo (2012) that citations functioned differently in different thesis chapters, the analysis on the Antconc concordance and from interviews with actual thesis writers and their supervisors tended to show that these writers were not fully aware of the importance of citations as a rhetorical device in their thesis writing, and in-text citations were not paid due attention to in the TESOL discourse community in Vietnam.These were reflected through these writers' belief that citations are required to be in the LR chapters only, the presence of a few citations at the concluding chapters of the thesis corpus, their unconventional ways of citing and the existence of grammatical mistakes in citing previous studies.Despite their preference for integral citations over the non-integral ones, these writers' listing of previous researchers and findings rather than synthesising and integrating them into their texts and their limited uses of citation functions were likely to show that they could not fully acquire citation uses through their mere reading of the provided guidelines by their universities.Despite the small scale of study and the fact it was not conducted in a move-related approach as recent studies on citations (Kwan & Chan 2014, Samraj 2013), the findings of this paper, to a certain extent, can provide a preliminary picture of how NNEWs cite in their M.A. theses.

3L:
The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies -Vol 22(3): 79 -92 !85 TABLE 1. Citation types in each chapter of 24 TESOL M.A. theses in Vietnam N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N I N

TABLE 2 .
Citation types and functions in each chapter of 24 TESOL M.A. theses in Vietnam I: Introductions; LR: Literature Review; M: Methodology; R: Results; D: Discussions; R-D: Results-Discussions; C: Conclusions

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"…I rarely check on the technical things like thesis format or citation uses…Thesis writers are supposed to know these things by themselves.If not, it could be the university's fault.As a supervisor, I mainly focus on how my supervisees form research questions derived from their research purposes, then their conceptual frameworks, research design, subjects, statistics…" (S2)