Manifest intertextuality in higher education students texts. Quotes characterization at an initial stage of academic formation

Abstract

One of the characteristics of academic genres is the manifest intertextuality. This aspect has been extensively studied in expert’s papers, but less in texts of students. In this context, the present research proposes a characterization of intertextual fragments of 30 essays, which were written by incoming students from a Chilean university. After analyzing the dimensions of literality, precision of mechanism and syntactic integration, it was observed that the majority of quotes appeared integrated and they were presented as periphrasis. However, the precision dimension reveals that, in reality, textual quotations predominate. Moreover, the emerging dimension of fidelity stands out, which specifies the difficulties experienced by the students when incorporating into their texts the voices of others and contributes to inform more precisely the pedagogical practice.