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Introduction
Writing from sources (WFS) tasks are ubiquitous in higher education (HE) & student success is dependent on their mastery (Dovey, 2010; Fiorella & Mayer, 2020; Grabe & Zhang, 2016; Hirvela, 2026; Ramoroka, 2025; Spivey, 1990; Swales & Lindemann, 2002; Ye & Liu, 2023). Additionally, Nesi & Gardner (2012) argue that WFS abilities are foundational to all genre families of academic writing.
This report will briefly summarise the WFS construct as it relates to pre-sessional, English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP), undergraduate students preparing for English as a Medium of Instruction programmes in HE settings, & its constituent processes, issues that students typically encounter, & offer suggestions for strategies & techniques for supporting students in learning to write from sources.
Theoretical framework
I will take a Systemic Functional Linguistics theoretical lens (Halliday, 1978), i.e. that WFS is a staged, sequenced, purposeful social semiotic act of participation in academic discourse communities (Myers et al., 2021; Rose & Martin, 2012).
The WFS construct
In HE, students must gain competence in intertextuality & epistemologically responsible writing (Hirvela, 2026; Swales & Lindemann, 2002), a process by which students internalise relevant information, transforming it into knowledge, & then impose structure upon it according to a given WFS task. WFS tasks require students to imagine the task & audience, generate meaning, & set & monitor goals & sub-goals, thereby demonstrating flexible, transferable understanding of the subject matter (Chan, 2018; Grabe & Zhang, 2016; Swales & Lindemann, 2002). Fiorella & Mayer (2020) have defined this process as the Selecting, Organising, & Integrating (SOI) principle. In HE contexts, SOI summarising activities tend to return very large effect sizes (d = 1.37), which are even larger for weaker readers (d = 1.58), thereby providing higher learning gains for those who need it most (Fiorella & Mayer, 2020).
In WFS, stance may be used to demonstrate deep understanding of the sources, engage in critical thinking, & claim academic authority (Ramoroka, 2025). A key aspect of critical writing is choosing evaluative reporting verbs to serve specific, purposeful rhetorical functions such as hedging, support, persuasion, commitment, & criticality (Ramoroka, 2025; Thomas & Hawes, 1994).
However, the WFS process is also an internal psychological construct which is not apparent from discourse analysis alone (Dovey, 2010; Swales & Lindemann, 2002). What’s more, it is a configuration of complex, interdependent, non-linear sub-processes which integrate the reading & writing processes iteratively & recursively (Chan, 2018; Hirvela, 2026; Spivey, 1990; Swales & Lindemann, 2002; Ye & Liu, 2023).
Needless to say, such a complex activity is highly demanding & carries a significant risk of overloading students’ cognitive resources (Grabe & Zhang, 2016), which typically results in students employing strategies that lead them to fragmented processing, abandoning their initial composition plan (Delaney, 2008), & patchwriting as a coping mechanism, i.e. mechanically editing surface features from source texts to avoid plagiarism, & low-coherence, low-cohesion WFS output (Dovey, 2010; Hirvela, 2001; Spivey, 1990).
In the EGAP context, WFS is a qualitatively distinct construct from reading for comprehension tests & writing in public non-academic genres (Moore & Morton, 2005) typically found in the Secure English Language Tests (SELTs) preferred by HE institutions, such as IELTS & Cambridge English*. As a result, the WFS construct is often not represented in students’ prior English language preparation (Hirvela, 2026; Moore & Morton, 2005). Swales & Lindemann (2002) reported systemic failures & that students typically feel underprepared for WFS.
*However, Trinity College London’s Integrated Skills in English exams do have a “Reading into Writing” section where candidates are required to perform a brief WFS task.
Recommendations
Framed as a participatory cognitive apprenticeship approach (Kirschner & Hendrick, 2020; Lave & Wenger, 1991) & acculturation into academic literacies (Lea & Street, 1998; Nesi & Gardner, 2012; Philippine State College of Aeronautics, Philippines & Esperanzate, 2025; Swales & Lindemann, 2002), & since WFS development consists of mutually supportive bidirectional influences between reading to write & writing to learn (Grabe & Zhang, 2016), EGAP tutors should address WFS development as a unified, integrated activity (Delaney, 2008).
Progressive complexity & cognitive demand
In order to avoid cognitive overload, patchwriting, lack of coherence & cohesion, & overall poor learning outcomes, it is important to design instructional materials & learning tasks that challenge but do not overwhelm students’ available cognitive capacity (Sweller et al., 2011). To this end:
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(Hirvela, 2001, 2026) suggests a hierarchy of WFS tasks in order from low to high cognitive load: Public non-academic writing → Factual summarisation → Evaluative synthesis;
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Swales & Lindemann (2002) recommend WFS instruction which progresses up a “genre ladder” of cognitive demand from: Summarisation → Part genres → Evaluative synthesis;
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(Merriënboer & Kirschner, 2017) elaborate a systematic taxonomy of practice task types which impose progressive degrees of complexity & cognitive load: Case study/worked example → Reverse task → Imitation → Non-specific goal/open-ended → Completion → Conventional (whole) task.
Additionally, extraneous cognitive load can be substantially reduced &, counter-intuitively, learner independence cultivated by providing explicit instruction, i.e. analysing, explicating, modelling, & guided practice, thereby increasing learning outcomes (Merriënboer & Kirschner, 2017; Rose & Martin, 2012; Sweller et al., 2011).
Disciplinary variation
Disciplinary literacy means that different disciplines place specific & often unique demands on synthesis, e.g. Historians evaluate bias whereas biologists evaluate replicability, & so the language used to perform these very different types of evaluation require very different discourse features (Grabe & Zhang, 2016). In EGAP courses/programmes, it may be productive to compare & contrast discipline-specific schemas for organising information from sources, e.g. problem-solution-evaluation, narrative sequence, compare & contrast, or general-specific hierarchical organisation structures, in order to develop rhetorical flexibility (Swales & Lindemann, 2002).
Writing From Sources Instructional Materials Evaluation Rubric
The following (See Table 1, below) is a WFS curriculum evaluation rubric consisting of a selection of strategies & techniques that show potential for supporting WFS competence development.
Scoring key:
✓ = Sufficient;
? = Needs improvement – Follow up with suggestions;
✗ = Absent – Should be provided;
N/A = Not applicable.
Table 1: Writing From Sources Instructional Materials Evaluation Rubric
Recommendations |
✓ |
? |
✗ |
N/A |
|
Tutors need to… |
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|
1 |
Learning rationale: …impress upon students the necessity, value, & benefits of developing expertise in WFS for developing discipline-specific knowledge so as to cultivate motivation & purposeful studying attitudes; |
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|
2 |
Constructive alignment: …ensure that Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs), instruction, tasks, & assessment are sufficiently specific, detailed, & align with each other (Biggs & Tang, 2007); |
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|
3 |
Cognitive load: …design progressively more complex & demanding learning activities, & provide explicit instruction & deliberate practice to support WFS proficiency development (Merriënboer & Kirschner, 2017); |
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|
4 |
Contextualisation: …avoid isolated, decontextualised instruction of linguistic features or “mechanical” (non-purposeful) paraphrasing as this may result in a lack of coherence & cohesion in students’ writing (Merriënboer & Kirschner, 2017; Spivey, 1990; Ye & Liu, 2023); |
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|
5 |
Well-defined: …assign authentic, well-defined WFS tasks, i.e. writing for a specific context, situation, purpose, & audience, which informs the SOI process, allowing students to narrow down the information they need to process & learn (Dovey, 2010; Grabe & Zhang, 2016; Merriënboer & Kirschner, 2017; Spivey, 1990); |
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|
6 |
Top-down processing: …prioritise functional discourse & genre awareness, i.e. genre stages & sequencing & rhetorical move analysis so that students can develop coherent, cohesive, transferable schemas of discipline-specific genres (Dovey, 2010; Grabe & Zhang, 2016; Myers, et al., 2021; Swales & Lindemann, 2002); |
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Students need to learn to… |
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|
7 |
“Control the sources or they will control you.” …group sources logically according to themes &/or variables, e.g. by posing thematic questions, to organise them into schemas to fit the task, rather than simply listing sources arbitrarily (Grabe & Zhang, 2016; Swales & Lindemann, 2002); |
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|
8 |
Concise reading: …seek information only to inform &/or support arguments that align with the WFS task, i.e. reject extraneous details & irrelevant arguments (Swales & Lindemann, 2002); |
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|
9 |
General to detailed understanding: …first read to get a general sense of the topic, i.e. an organisational schema in which to situate subsequent, more detailed information from more specific sources (Grabe & Zhang, 2016; Swales & Lindemann, 2002); |
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|
10 |
Check understanding: …summarise or explain concepts in their own words while reading in order to check for understanding (Swales & Lindemann, 2002); |
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Tutors provide explicit instruction in… |
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11 |
SOI principle: …Selecting Organising, & Integrating information from the sources. This is arguably the predominant mechanism for learning from WFS (Fiorella & Mayer, 2020); |
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|
12 |
Graphic Organisers (GOs): …the strategic use of GOs during SOI, i.e. to visually represent & organise ideational categories, connections, & relationships of concepts & processes from the sources to improve coherence & cohesion (Dovey, 2010; Fiorella & Mayer, 2020); |
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13 |
Connections/relationships: …connecting concepts with the topic or thematic questions to check for relevance & cohesion (Swales & Lindemann, 2002); |
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14 |
Bottom-up processing: …functional analysis of authors’ lexicogrammatical choices in the source texts (words, phrases, & patterns), thereby explicitly establishing & strengthening form-meaning connections (Dovey, 2010); |
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|
15 |
Intertextuality: …analysis of lexicogrammatical register features, developing awareness of citation features, stance-taking & evaluation, degrees of certainty, hedging, etc.. (Swales & Lindemann, 2002); |
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|
16 |
Cohesion: …metadiscourse features which signal organisation of arguments & improve readability (Swales & Lindemann, 2002); |
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|
17 |
Disciplinary schematic differences: …comparison & contrast of how different disciplines adopt different epistemological schemas for organising & critically evaluating information from source texts (Swales & Lindemann, 2002); |
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|
18 |
Stance-taking: …evaluative/stance-taking functions of reporting verbs in order to claim authorial voice (Ramoroka, 2025; Thomas & Hawes, 1994); |
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|
19 |
Disciplinary citation differences: …comparison & contrast of citation practices, e.g. foregrounding concepts in Natural Sciences, with scientific laws vs. foregrounding authors in Social Sciences, where arguments are more contested (Swales & Lindemann, 2002); |
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|
20 |
Develop learner independence: …mining source texts from their own disciplines for ideational items, i.e. information that’s relevant to the WFS task, & lexicogrammar, i.e. words, phrases, & patterns, so that students may do the same independently in their respective disciplines (Ye & Liu, 2023; Myers, et al., 2021); |
Conclusion
Developing WFS abilities is essential to students’ successful participation in HE contexts. As it is so cognitively demanding, discipline-specific, & often unfamiliar to students, it requires explicit, carefully sequenced instruction. The strategies outlined in this report offer a theoretical framework for tutors to help students avoid falling into patchwriting traps &, instead engage purposefully & confidently with academic sources. The above WFS instruction evaluation rubric may be used as a practical instrument for ensuring that EGAP curricula effectively support learning to write from sources.
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