ABSTRACT
Research on source-based writing for academic purposes has seen tremendous growth over the past twenty years or so and has contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of learning to write with sources. Recent studies have moved away from a deficit model that conceptualizes novice L2 students’ unconventional source use practices as unethical, focusing instead on challenges that students experience when learning unfamiliar source use conventions. Despite these advances, an important area that has not received sufficient attention is learner reasoning, i.e., how novice L2 writers interpret source use conventions for academic writing and how they make practical writing decisions for assignments that are often beyond their proficiency. In this chapter, we draw on existing literature and our own work to show how foregrounding learner reasoning can help writing instructors and researchers understand what it means and takes for novice writers to learn unfamiliar source use conventions.
