“I have no time to find out where the sentences came from; I just rebuild them”: A biochemistry professor eliminating novices’ textual borrowing

English as an Additional Language (EAL) students’ textual borrowing in disciplinary writing has attracted wide research interest in recent years. However, much of the research was conducted in the regular curriculum setting while the relevance of the issue in a writing-for-publication context has largely been overlooked. In particular, disciplinary experts’ perspectives concerning textual borrowing have not been explored in-depth. The present study fills such a gap in the literature by looking into how an expert writer, a professor of biochemistry in a Chinese university, perceived novices’ textual borrowing in their initial drafts and eliminated such borrowing as he redrafted novice texts for publication. The study revealed that the expert had complete tolerance for his students’ copying and that his elimination of it during redrafting was guided by his genre expertise and rhetorical skills for publishing. The paper also pointed out that the shortage of explicit teaching from the supervisor to his students as well as the lack of active participation of his students in the writing process was bound to the publication pressure in the local institutional context.

► Illuminates an EAL biochemistry professor's perspectives on novices’ textual borrowing in their initial draft of a research paper.
► Shows how the expert writer eliminates novices’ textual borrowing as he revises a paper for publication.
► Shows that the expert's elimination of textual borrowing is guided by his genre expertise and rhetorical skills for publishing.
► Points out that the shortage of explicit teaching from the supervisor to his students is bound to the publication pressure in the local context.