Reported speech in academic writing: a skill developed on graduation

Résumé 0

The management of quotations is a challenge that students face throughout their coursework. In the academic context, it is indeed essential to know how to identify and correctly quote sources, especially in a period where professors are regularly confronted with issues of plagiarism. In this poster, we propose to demonstrate how reported speech in its written specificities is a skill that students develop through their undergraduate years and its essential character in academic writing. Students are always confronted with the representation of discourses other than their own (Delcambre and Lahanier-Reuter, 2012; Boch and Grossmann, 2001; Kara, 2004) in academic writing. It is generally the discourse of scientists recognized in their discipline, taking the linguistic form of what is traditionally called “reported speech” – often limited to three canonical forms: direct speech, indirect speech and free indirect speech. Following Authier-Revuz 2020, we will consider the forms of reported speech as "Representation of the Other Discourse" since this model has the advantage to cover categories which are classically excluded from the realm of reported speech but that are extremely present in academic writing (Boré, 2004). The corpus analyzed is composed of 100 handwritten exam papers produced by undergraduate students in Performing Arts, History and Economic, and Social Administration between 2015 and 2019 at the University of Paris Nanterre. These copies were digitized at the Archives service of the university and then analyzed following the five modes of "Representation of the Other Discourse": direct speech, indirect speech, free indirect speech, reported quote modalizations (fr. modalisation en assertion seconde; e.g. Simon Zebo won't walk into Irish set-up, according to Tommy Bowe) and autonymic quote modalizations (fr. modalization autonymique d’emprunt; e.g. Lisa Bloom, a lawyer for alleged victims of Jeffrey Epstein, described the settlement as “one of the most bizarre” she had ever seen).A comparison of the number of reported speech forms according to the level of study shows that its use more than doubles between the first and third year of the bachelor’s degree, going from 177 occurrences in the first year to 427 occurrences in the third year. These results emphasize the fact that academic writing is a skill built throughout the students' education (Boch and Grossmann, 2002), in the context of a practice.