A mixed methods study revealed that a diverse student population pursued English-language proofreading services to improve their writing and academic marks. The types of interventions reported suggest that students’ pursuit of third-party proofreading may reflect an ideologically based fear of being positioned as deficient writers because of minor lexicogrammatical errors.
Students’ use of English-language proofreading for the correction of academic writing has raised issues of ethics and academic integrity, particularly with respect to L2 writers in the context of internationalization of higher education. Several studies have examined issues surrounding proofreading from the perspectives of students, instructors, PhD supervisors, and proofreaders themselves (e.g., Harwood, Austin, & Macaulay, 2010; Harwood 2018, 2019; Turner, 2011, 2012). Yet most of our understanding of academic proofreading comes from in-depth qualitative research, and there have been few efforts to quantify students’ reasons for pursuing proofreading or the types of interventions they seek for written texts. This presentation reports select findings from a mixed methods exploratory study of proofreading practices among students enrolled at a large North American research university. Broadly defining proofreading as third-party corrective interventions in student writing (following Harwood et al., 2010), this study employed an online survey (N=145) and follow-up interviews (N=8) to identify demographics of students who used proofreading and to explore their reasons for doing so, the nature and extent of proofreading they received, and their perceived outcomes of receiving proofreading. The study found that a linguistically diverse sample of students from all levels of study pursued proofreading to improve their writing skills and academic marks. The majority reported receiving edits to word- and sentence-level errors, which interviewees characterized in such terms as “small stuff.” Viewed in terms of indexicality (following Turner, 2018), the types of edits students received and their reported reasons for using proofreading suggest a fear that seemingly minor errors could play an outsize role in marking them as non-native English speakers and/or deficient writers. Based on the findings, the researcher will argue that proofreading reflects students’ ideologically driven desire to “clarify” or “cleanse” their writing (Davila, 2016; Turner, 2018) to attain the standard English valorized in academia.
