The Language Teacher
05 - 2002

A(nother) Student Guide to Plagiarism

David McMurray

The International University of Kagoshima

The inaugural Readers' Forum column featuring MacGregor's (2002) proposed student guide to plagiarism was an excellent starting point. The monthly distribution of TLT among colleagues inspired me to respond with another view to try and sway some readers to take a softer approach when guiding their Japanese students--who are new to academic writing in English--away from willful plagiarizing. I support this thesis with three points intended to improve her guide. Academic definitions for plagiarism vary; it might be more effective to inform students that it necessarily implies the intent by the student to deceive the reader. Undergraduate EFL writers can rarely distinguish what is common knowledge, and in most disciplines and cultural arts in Japan, students intent on graduate study or mastering a skill must copy the work of their mentors before attempting their own creativity. Rather than focus on citing one source, a practical model could guide students to cite several sources, while adding their own voice to a passage.

1) Instead of scaring novice students about the penalties of failure and expulsion from school, teachers who emphasize the positive aspects of quoting authors, for example to share new avenues of research with their readers, will likely motivate students past the hurdles of writer's block and toward wanting to understand more about the strange codes and special language of academic culture. The stark definition of plagiarism referred to in the guide meant for high school and undergraduate students is an extreme one coined by Gibaldi who, as lead editor of the MLA Style Manual for graduate students and teachers warns that plagiarists could lose their degrees, tenure and jobs. His definition leaves no room for excuses of unintentional copying or of making no attempt to conceal the sources (1998, p. 151). EFL learners' dictionaries, however, soften this strict interpretation and include the proviso that being accused of using another person's ideas or work also implies the student actually pretended that it was his or her own. For example, the Cambridge learner dictionary entry for a plagiarist includes this escape-route model: "I was accused of being a plagiarist, but it was just a coincidence that what I wrote was like what she wrote" (Proctor, et al., 1995, p. 1074).

2) First year students of a discipline have little or no repertoire of common knowledge and recognize few famous quotations in English. In addition to providing Martin Luther King's quotation as such an example in the guide, students might find comfort in also learning that the famous pastor, who plagiarized his own doctoral dissertation and graduate essays, was well-known for using the words of others, unacknowledged in his speeches perhaps because of his dream that religious teachings would be considered a shared wealth, not private property (Angelil-Carter, 2000, p. 40). When my students and I tried the sample worksheet found in the appendix suggested by MacGregor (2002, p. 15) we decided that the answers to the quiz were: (a) It is a quotation because there are quotation marks and a citation; (b) The name of the author of the article can't be guessed, only the author of the quote is identified; and (c) The article was published sometime after the cited MacGregor article was published. We remain unsure of our responses because the text used in the appendix with quotations was also used in the main article without quotes but sourced to an article written in 2001 by MacGregor in Lingua--which must be the clue to the chase. My students complained, however, that only I as a colleague in the same discipline as the author possessed that necessary key to understanding.

3) It is more useful for students to be shown how to cite several sources and combine them into a paragraph and how to find some remaining room in that paragraph to add some of their own thoughts. Successful EFL learners are taught to "chunk" pieces of language together rather than construct sentences word by word. In so doing they tend to chunk phrases by several researchers that they are often unable to summarize or paraphrase; they require a model. The Cambridge International Dictionary of English aimed at EFL learners of intermediate abilities included in the entry for "plagiarism... 'If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research' (believed to have been said by Wilson Mizner, 1876 - 1933)" (1995, p. 1074). In the same manner as MacGregor (p.14), who shared a "Further Reading" list with her colleagues to help us study more about this important topic, students respond to being encouraged to share information because it could be helpful to their classmates, not to being discouraged by the threat of penalties. Novice students can be motivated, with the carrot rather than the stick, to bring their own knowledge, culture and personal history into their writing, which includes interpretations of others'' helpful work.

References

Angelil-Carter, S. (2000). Stolen language? Plagiarism in writing. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
Gibaldi, J. (1998). MLA style manual and guide to scholarly publishing (2nd ed.). New York: The Modern Language Association of America.
MacGregor, L. (2002). A student guide to plagiarism. The Language Teacher, 26(1), 11-15.
Proctor, P., et al. (Eds.). (1995). Cambridge international dictionary of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The author replies

Laura MacGregor

Gakushuin University

I will briefly respond to McMurray's reflections on my article to clarify my position on teaching students about plagiarism and respond to some of his remarks.

1. I am not suggesting that teachers "scare" novice students. However, explaining the penalties plagiarism carries helps them understand an important cultural difference between academic writing in Japanese and the expectations of a western audience.

2. I maintain the generous position that students who are new to academic writing plagiarize unknowingly. Teaching students what plagiarism is and ways to avoid it levels the playing field. Then, teachers have the right to judge the work.

3. Coincidental occurrences of similar thoughts and ideas are certainly possible and any fair evaluator would give students the benefit of the doubt. What is more to the point is to alert students that cutting and pasting long passages from a published source without acknowledging it is not allowed. Nor is splicing and weaving phrases from two or more sources.

3. Thank you for pointing out the error in the appendix. Question (b) in Part C should read, "Who is the author of the quotation?" Perhaps this exercise was too simplistic for your students, who may already know the elements of quoted material. I did indicate, however, this worksheet was intended as an introduction to plagiarism. In my experience, many student writers are unaware that they must put quotation marks around quoted material and annotate the quotation in a certain way. The exercises in the appendix simply build awareness of what a quotation looks like.

4. Your suggestion to show students "how to cite several sources and combine them into a paragraph and how to find some remaining room in that paragraph to add some of their own thoughts" may be well-intentioned, but this is far too difficult a task for novice writers. Instead, students new to academic writing should be responsible for no more than two or three sources for an entire paper and should only be expected to handle one source at a time.

In closing, I agree that positive motivation is essential for positive performance. However, there is no need to offer a carrot; a plagiarism-free paper should be reward enough.



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