ABSTRACT

Pluriliterate academic practices offer students who are literate in both their L1 and English the possibility of relying on sources in multiple languages. Surprisingly, there is little research on the factors playing a role in students’ choice of sources and whether this choice is related solely or partly to the language of the source. This study examines whether students from a French-speaking Belgian university use pluriliterate strategies when writing their master thesis (n = 240). The objective is to investigate to which extent the selection of sources written in English rather than in other languages depends on the language of writing and on the faculty where the thesis was submitted. This study shows that students writing in English tend to have a more pronounced preference for sources in English in their readings, with estimated proportions above 93.6% across faculties, compared with students writing in French on fairly similar topics, especially in the social sciences. For example, theses in Management have an estimated proportion of sources in English between 90.1% and 96.5% when written in English and between 35% and 61.1% when written in French. These findings highlight the need for investigations on students’ attitudes towards pluriliteracy.

摘要

多文化的学术实践为既具有L1语言又具有英语水平的学生提供了依赖多种语言来源的可能性。令人惊讶的是，很少有关于影响学生选择来源的因素以及这种选择是完全还是部分与来源语言有关的研究。这项研究调查了来自法语的比利时大学的学生在撰写硕士论文时是否使用多文化策略（n = 240）。目的是研究选择英语而不是其他语言编写的资源时，在何种程度上取决于写作语言和提交论文的学院。这项研究表明，与以法语写作的学生在相当相似的话题（尤其是在社会科学领域）相比，用英语写作的学生在阅读中倾向于更倾向于英语，在所有院系中估计比例超过93.6％。例如，《管理学》的论文中，英语来源的比例估计在90.1％至96.5％之间，而英语来源的比例在35％至61.1％之间。这些发现强调了有必要对学生对多文化的态度进行调查。