How university students write from sources has been an issue of long-standing interest among researchers of advanced academic literacy. Previous research in this regard in the context of L2 writing has tended to focus on novices' textual borrowing; less attention has been given to exploring the potential light that theories from other intellectual…

In this paper we report a case study of two first-year students at a university in Hong Kong doing the same writing assignment that required the use of sources. We explore the students' understanding of plagiarism, their strategies for composing, the similarity between their texts and source texts, and the lecturer's assessment of their work. The…