Limiting Plagiarism In EFL Writing

Sample comparative summary/synthesis

“LIMITING PLAGIARISM IN EFL WRITING CLASSROOMS” AND

“YOUR OWN THOUGHTS IN YOUR OWN WORDS”:

A COMPARATIVE SYNTHESIS

Not until recently has the Western concept “plagiarism” become familiar to Asian academic culture in general and Vietnamese academic culture in particular. What it means by “plagiarism”, what causes plagiarism among EFL learners and how to limit plagiarism in EFL writing classrooms are currently the questions of serious concern among teachers of academic writing in different countries. In the two articles “Limiting Plagiarism in EFL Writing Classrooms” by Darunee Dujsik in THAITESOL BULLETIN Volume 15/2 August 2002 and “Your Own Thoughts in Your Own Words” by Jane Sherman in ELT Journal

According to Leonhard (1999, as cited in Dujsik (2002:?): “Plagiarism is a form of cheating that involves borrowing or paraphrasing ideas from another person without acknowledging the source.” Dujsik adds that there exist two types of plagiarists – intentional and unintentional. Intentional plagiarists are those who duplicate other students’ papers to make them their own. Unintentional plagiarists, whereas, write the papers themselves but lack proper citation. Sherman (1992), on the other hand, notes the concrete symptoms of her Italian students which include repeating without any modification, rote-learning for exams, using others’ ideas without acknowledging and lacking reasoning. Sadly, I must concede that all these symptoms can be found in Vietnamese education. From my own teaching experience, I myself find that most of my university students are unintentional plagiarists. They always answer the teacher’s questions by picking up the exact words from the source, remember and recall information in a test, and seldom or even never cite the source in a proper

EFL students plagiarize in different ways varying from unintentional type such as giving verbatim answer, rote-learning for exams, borrowing others’ words and ideas without acknowledging the source, to intentionally stealing others’ papers and treat them as their own. The causes for this phenomenon also vary from country to country. Thai students plagiarize because they lack awareness of the notion of plagiarism, lack citation skills and lack teacher monitoring during the writing process, whereas Italian students do so because they fail to distinguish fact from opinion, to develop argument or just because they want to maintain their “bella figura”. The common point these two authors agree on is that academic culture is the underlying cause. Useful recommendations for limiting plagiarism are also suggested including setting up the penalty, raising students’ awareness, keeping track of students’ wring process, teaching them how to cite properly, and especially making a cultural syllabus. Information from these articles is really helpful for us, EFL