Citation practices in spoken academic English: A case study of student oral presentations

The paper focuses on a spoken academic genre, the university student’s oral presentation, in which one or more undergraduate or graduate students discuss a research project or a scholarly writing in front of their class as part of their lecture courses. The study is based on oral presentations by native English speaking university students taken from the American database of academic speech, the MICASE corpus (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, Simpson et al. 1999) in the soft domain, namely humanities and social sciences. The study centres on a corpus-based analysis of that-complement clauses as reporting clauses used by native English speaking university students in their oral presentations, which project either the author’s ideas as a source presented by the student or those of the student across the two disciplinary areas. The analysis shows that there is a considerable use of that-complement clauses as reporting clauses in contexts where the student’s position is at issue. The study may offer some implications for the teaching of referencing skills in EAP speaking courses and raise students’ awareness about the importance of discussing sources properly by avoiding plagiarism and making their voice heard clearly throughout their oral presentations.