Referencing Conventions

Whether you are quoting directly or simply referring to source material, academic convention
requires that you should acknowledge where your information has come from. Always cite your
sources in the body of your text, and give references as appropriate at the end. You may find it
helpful to take note of the style adopted by the module authors, as well as using the guidance
on referencing conventions provided below.

The most commonly used method of referencing, and the one which is adopted in your E304
module texts, is the Harvard System. This involves indicating your source of information briefly
in the text with the author’s surname and the date of publication (usually within parentheses),
and then providing full details of the publication in a list of references at the end. Please note
that if you are quoting material directly, you will need to include the page number(s) with the in-
text reference.

Below are three examples of in-text references: the first accompanies a summary of what the
author has written; the second and third are alternative ways of referencing a direct quotation.

First Example:

 Firth (1957) was one of the first to argue that language must be interpreted in its context
of situation.

Second Example:

 Firth (1957, p. 193) stated that ‘speech events have to be apprehended in their
contexts’.

Third Example:

 Firth stated that ‘speech events have to be apprehended in their contexts’ (1957, p.
193).

Frequently you may want to reference the ideas or evidence from scholars other than the
module book authors themselves, as presented in the module materials. These are known as
secondary sources and need to be dealt with in a slightly different way. The important thing to
remember is that you need to indicate to your reader the source you have used, as well as
crediting the originator of the idea. Therefore you might write, for example:

 Firth (1957, cited in Tognini-Bonelli, 2001) is credited with developing the contextual
theory of meaning.

The reference list at the end of your piece of work shows all (and only) those publications to
which you have referred in the text. The full references for the two examples above would be:

1
  Firth, J. R. (1957) Papers in Linguistics 1934–51, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
 Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001) Corpus Linguistics at Work, Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

This reference enables readers to look up the original source if they wish.

All references, then, come in two parts:

(a) a ‘flag’ in your text providing minimum information to identify the publication referred
to

(b) full details in the list of references at the end of your work.

In your final list of references, the author(s), date, title and publication details appear in that
order. The titles of books, journals, and magazines should be set in italics (if you are
handwriting, then the convention is to use underlining instead of italics); the titles of articles,
chapters and journal extracts should be enclosed in inverted commas. For example:

 Biber, D. (1990) ‘Methodological issues regarding corpus-based analyses of linguistic

variation’, Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 257–69.

If you are using electronic material, such as documents from the World Wide Web, these will
also need to go in the list of references. They may include as many of the following as are
available, with the last two items being essential:

 the author’s surname and initial(s)

 the year of publication (in brackets)
 the title of the document (in inverted commas)
 the publisher
 the website URL
 the date on which the site was accessed.

Here is an example:

Plain English Campaign (2003) ‘Plain English translations’,

http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/translations.html (accessed 31 July 2003).

You do not need to include a full reference when referring to E304 module materials such as
module books it is acceptable just to list these as follows:

E304 Book X Unit X

E304 Activities Book X Unit X Activity X.

2
3