An Investigation into the Interactional Features of Citations in Academic Writing by Chinese master’s students

According to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), academic writing is viewed as an interactive event and a social exchange of meaning (Halliday & Hasan, 1989). Citations serve as an important bridge in establishing academic writing interactions, allowing authors to engage in discussions of relevant research and demonstrating how their findings contribute to the supplementation and development of the existing disciplinary knowledge base (Hyland, 2004). Existing citation studies tended to focus more on the functions and forms of citations, with little attention paid to the interactional aspect of citations, particularly how Chinese master’s students used citations to construct academic interaction in their academic writing. This study, using the engagement framework as a theoretical framework, explored the systematic features of how Chinese master’s students in applied linguistics used citations to construct interaction. The findings indicated that: (1) master’s students underused non-integral citations and excessively used verb-controlling integral citations; (2) they overused entertain in steps where negotiation should have been restricted; (3) they failed to evaluate the shortcomings of previous studies in the Literature Review section; (4) In the Results and Discussion section, master’s students failed to engage in a dialectical discussion of perspectives from existing research and to address the gaps in related studies. Based on these findings, the study offered some insights for teaching English academic writing.