academic literacy and plagiarism: conversations with international graduate students and...

www.elsevier.com/locate/jeapJournal of English for Academic Purposes 7 (2008) 221e233

Academic literacy and plagiarism: Conversations with internationalgraduate students and disciplinary professors

Ali R. Abasi a,*, Barbara Graves b,1

a School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USAb Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, LMX Hall, 145 Jean-Jacques Lussier Street, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada

Abstract

In this study we examine how university plagiarism policies interact with international graduate students’ academic writing inEnglish as they develop identities as authors and students. The study is informed by the sociocultural theoretical perspective[Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]that foregrounds the crucial role of appropriation in learning, and the Bakhtinian dialogism [Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogicimagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press; Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin, TX:University of Texas Press.] that highlights intertextuality as a fundamental feature of language use. Relying on multiple data sourcesincluding text-based interviews, in-depth interviews with students and disciplinary professors, course syllabi, field notes, andinstitutional documents, we consider the social discourses that surround students as they interact with prior sources in order tounderstand how they construct their texts. We discuss how university plagiarism policies frame the professor-student relationshipand influence student text production. We conclude by critiquing university plagiarism policies that serve to mystify academicwriting, negatively affecting those students who are less familiar with the genre of academic writing.� 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Academic literacy; Discourses; International students; Plagiarism

1. Introduction

In this study we are interested in understanding how university policies on textual plagiarism interact withinternational ESL graduate students’ academic writing as they develop identities as authors and students. Across theEnglish-speaking world, there is concern that plagiarism is on the rise, in large part the result of easy access toacademic papers on the internet. In North America more than four hundred colleges and universities have subscribedto an online database called Turnitin.com� to assist professors in detecting plagiarism in their students’ papers (TheCanadian Association of University Teachers, 2003). The underlying assumption is that plagiarized source materialsare evidence of an intention to defraud. Recently, an influential Canadian newspaper reported on a study by the

* Corresponding author. Tel. þ1 301 405 3315.

E-mail addresses: [email protected] (A.R. Abasi), [email protected] (B. Graves).1 Tel. þ1-613-562-5800x2225.

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222 A.R. Abasi, B. Graves / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7 (2008) 221e233

Council of Ontario Universities urging academic institutions to combat student plagiarism by shaming ‘‘cheaters andplagiarists to the extent that privacy laws allow’’ (Ottawa Citizen, ‘‘Go public on cheaters,’’ 2007, D.1). Students,accused of plagiarizing, must prove their innocence in order to alleviate the presumption that they are guilty.

In Australia, a new research journal was launched in 2005, the International Journal for Educational Integrity, tospecifically address issues of academic and educational integrity. Its first issue was devoted to examining ‘‘plagiarismin Australia, particularly in relation to the country’s historically high number of international students . . .’’ (Cohen,2007, p. A51). While there are no research studies reporting a higher incidence of plagiarism among internationalstudents studying in English-language universities, there is concern that these students may be more vulnerable toaccusations of fraud as their inappropriate textual borrowing is a more obvious departure from their own style ofwriting (McGowan, 2005; Pecorari, 2003; Valentine, 2006).

L1 and L2 writing researchers have been trying to understand the reasons that might account for unacceptable sourceappropriation. Some studies have explored student cognitive processes during summary or source-based writing undercontrolled task conditions, pointing to the effects of such intervening factors as language proficiency, task/text diffi-culty, and topical familiarity on student plagiarism (Campbell, 1990; Keck, 2006; Roig, 1999; Shi, 2004). Others havefocused on students’ attitudes and perceptions through questionnaires, surveys, or interviews, uncovering differences incross-cultural value systems and a lack of inter-subjectivity between students and instructors vis-a-vis the notion ofplagiarism (Ashworth, Bannister, & Thorne, 1997; Deckert, 1993; Kroll, 1988; Li, 2007; Moon, 2002; Overbey &Guiling, 1999; Sutherland-Smith, 2005). Increasingly, researchers who have studied student plagiarism in situ havebegun to reveal the complexity of the phenomenon, locating it in a web of sociocultural relations. The results of theseinquiries indicate that inappropriate source attributions might have to do with students’ culturally shaped life trajec-tories (Abasi, Akbari, & Graves, 2006; Cadman, 1997; Sherman, 1992), their outsider status relative to their prospectivediscourse communities (Angelil-Carter, 2000; Chandrasoma, Thompson, & Pennycook, 2004; Currie, 1993, 1998;Pecorari, 2003; Ritter, 2005; Thompson, 2005; Valentine, 2006), or their racial and social positioning excluding themfrom the rules and conventions of school literacy practices (Hull & Rose, 1989; Starfield, 2002).

Aiming to contribute to this growing literature, we are interested in understanding how university policies on‘‘apparent plagiarism’’ (Pecorari, 2003) interact with ESL graduate students’ academic writing and their developingidentities as authors and students. In order to understand how the university’s representation of matters of intertex-tuality intersects with students’ textual practices, we examine the social discourses that surround students as they enterinto a dialogue with prior sources in order to understand how they construct their own meanings and understand theirown text production. At the same time, we consider the perspectives of university professors on students’ writing andthe ways in which the institutional policies interact with the professor-student relationships.

2. The study

2.1. Theoretical framework

This work is informed by theoretical perspectives located within a sociocultural-historical framework that focus onboth the situated and distributed nature of learning mediated by the cultural artifacts and practices of a community(Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Vygotsky, 1978; Wenger, 1998; Wertsch, 1994). Based on this conception oflearning, appropriation of language as the most pervasive semiotic means in human social activities plays a centralrole in learning. Accordingly, we view academic writing as a situated activity mediated by institutional discourses andpractices (Foucault, 1981; Gee, 1996; Lemke, 1995). Of particular relevance to this paper is the Bakhtinian dialogictheory of language that brings to the fore the heavily borrowed character of language use as well as the intertextualnature of such use in the sense that all utterances respond to, and anticipate, other utterances (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986;Volosinov, 1973).

We further view academic writing as social practice (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Brodkey, 1987; Gee, 1996), whichallows us to conceive of academic writing as a complex of literacy practices patterned by discipline-specific ways ofreading and writing as well as the particular attitudes and beliefs that members of a given disciplinary community holdtoward literate practice. This understanding of academic writing further reveals how writers simultaneously construct,and are constructed, by their texts (Fairclough, 1992; Kress, 1989). All writing is discursive, affording writers withparticular ways of using the language as well as particular subject positions to take up. Therefore, as writers constructtheir texts, they simultaneously construct certain social identities through their texts (Clark & Ivani�c, 1997; Ivani�c,

223A.R. Abasi, B. Graves / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7 (2008) 221e233

1998). We thus understand students’ written texts as intertextual responses to pedagogical and institutional practicesthat simultaneously are articulated from, and (re)articulate, social discourses.

By foregrounding the central role of appropriation in human learning, the sociocultural framework adopted herequestions the dominant authorial ideology (and by implication, the notion of textual plagiarism) that rests upon theindividual ownership of language and ideas, and challenges the belief that authorship is individual and original. It alsodirects our attention to the dilemma for student writers: On the one hand, they need to appropriate from others in orderto learn to write; on the other, they must put the words and ideas they borrow into their own words to avoid accusationsof academic fraud. The challenge becomes more pronounced for international students writing in another language,who might not yet have access to ‘‘words of their own’’ in that language.

2.2. Method

In order to understand how university plagiarism policies intersect with international graduate students’ academicwriting, we used the tools of ethnography to study the writing activities of four international graduate students duringtwo consecutive semesters in 2005 in their first year of graduate school at a large Canadian university.

The participants. The graduate students, three women and one man, came from different parts of the worldincluding South America, Asia, and Europe. Amorita had completed a journalism degree in Chile and had worked asa journalist for a few years before coming to Canada to do a Masters; Salma was completing a degree she began inSpain, and her studies in Canada would be considered part of that degree; Hako had completed a BA in InternationalCommunications in Japan and had worked as member of an NGO in Japan before beginning her graduate studies; Leehad completed his undergraduate degree in Beijing and had worked for four years for a Chinese television stationbefore beginning his Masters in Canada. All of the graduate students had successfully completed a TOFEL testrequired for admission to the graduate program. Their scores ranged from 588 to 603.

Three graduate courses were selected as sites, one in the Department of Communication and two in the Faculty ofEducation. The three professors from these courses were also participants in the research, along with an additionaltwelve professors from both academic programs.

Data sources. Data sources for the study included in-depth interviews with the four international graduate studentsto learn about their previous experiences, their attitudes about academic writing, and their views on their currentwriting assignments. Additional interviews that focused specifically on the academic texts the students produced ineach course were conducted. These text-based interviews (Bazerman & Prior, 2004) allowed us to more fullyunderstand students’ reasons for adopting certain textual practices including their decision-making with respect totextual appropriation and source attribution.

In-depth interviews were conducted with the three course professors in order to understand their literacy practices,expectations for their students, and beliefs about the genre of academic writing. Interviews were also conducted withthe additional faculty members associated with the same fields of study to get a broader picture of disciplinary literacypractices.

In each of the three courses, the professors allowed us to audit the course. One of the authors audited all threecourses over the two academic semesters. This participation included attending each class session and reading all theassigned materials for each course. This was an important aspect of the research design as it provided us witha detailed understanding of the context as well as the experiences of the students in each class. The researcher auditingthe courses also worked in a tutorial role with the international students as they prepared their writing assignments.From these interactions we were able to collect textual artifacts such as course syllabi, writing style guides, universitybrochures on plagiarism, professors’ written feedback, and email exchanges between faculty and students via list-serves. Extensive field notes were also developed during/from the class sessions.

Our process of data analysis was interpretive and holistic as we worked to understand what the faculty and studentsconsidered to be important writing assignments; how they understood referencing, source attribution, and plagiarism;and how the university policies on plagiarism intersected with their work as students and professors. We integratedmultiple research inscriptions including verbatim transcripts of all of the interviews, the students’ papers, institutionaltextual artifacts, and the field and analytical notes, and we read these multiple data sources repeatedly and inter-textually against each other in order to arrive at a documented narrative (Eisner, 1998; Richardson, 2000). In this paperwe draw on representative verbatim responses from the professors and the international students in order to allow theirvoices and positions on these issues to emerge.


3. Emergent understandings

In what follows we discuss the professional literacy practices into which the faculty wished to socialize their students.We next consider what the students were actually thinking about source use and referencing, highlighting a disjuncturebetween professors’ and students’ subjectivities as to what academic writing is about. We also consider the role of insti-tutional plagiarism policies in contributing to the disjuncture. Finally, we discuss the punitive framing of matters ofintertextuality by the university that trivializes the complex issueof referencing and mystifies the genre of academic writing.

3.1. The professors’ expectations: students performing as authors

As we listened to lectures, examined course outlines and essay requirements, reviewed the professors’ interviewsabout what they valued in a successful academic paper, and linked these statements together, a dominating discoursedrew our attention. From the perspective of the professors, there was a clear expectation and responsibility to assistgraduate students in becoming full participants in the academy and proficient in the academic literacy practices.

You should approach this assignment as though you [were] preparing an article for submission to a peer-reviewed academic journal. (Duncan, Course outline, p. 15)

To support students in that endeavour the literacy practices that were valued emphasized extensive reading in thefield, and ongoing, engaged discussion and reflection on those readings, both in and out of class.

You know one of the things we’re trying to train you to do is research and an essential part of that . . . is havingat least a good sense of what’s happening out there. What are people saying? What are the arguments? Whatare the theoretical foundations? What are the concepts? What are tangible issues? and . . . sort of conveying tothe reader of the paper, just as with the journal article, that you have surveyed the domain in sufficient detail interms of publishing to make this paper publishable. (Daniel, Professor, interview)

As they described their learning objectives, the professors seemed to express a sociocultural-historical under-standing of knowledge production as emerging from interactions with others and mediated by a range of semioticresources. In addition, there was repeated emphasis on the dialogic nature of these activities, revealing an assumptionthat knowledges emerge from the students’ collective participation and engagement with the readings and issues.

Well, the responses part [required in students’ papers] is the notion of dialogue, conversation, multiple voices,and in the sense that in any discipline they are many conversations of course going on. And then as you travelaround, you will notice that there are conversations about epistemology, and there are conversations aboutpractice and within each of those there are different modules of conversation and so on. So the response part isabout being a listener or reader of those utterances . . . The creative part is about making new arguments,adding something new to the conversation. (Daniel, Professor, interview)

One professor highlighted this disposition to create an environment for discussion and collaboration in an emailsent out to the whole class:

I do want to remind everyone that a key function of the discussions is for you to present/raise issues from thereadings that you believe merit further attention (i.e. something which you find to be unclear, an alternativeinterpretation you may have, how two or more of the readings may be juxtaposed, an argument that youbelieve could be developed on the basis of the readings). (Duncan, Professor, course listserve)

Many of the statements and activities of the professors suggested a dialogic process of knowledge productionwhereby learning occurs in the joint interactions among participants. In addition, specific references were made to‘‘picking up vocabulary’’ necessary for speaking about the topic, which suggested a Bakhtinian understanding ofutterance as part of the way we learn:

I expect them to read and to listen to each other and to share ideas of what they’re reading and hearing. I’mexpecting that through the course of the readings and the conversations that they will be picking upa vocabulary or they will be developing an enriched vocabulary for speaking about the subject at hand. I thinkthat’s inevitable. (Daniel, Professor, interview)


To that end, the recency of the assigned readings was seen as an important aspect of the professional literacypractices that the professors wanted the graduate students to take up. In all courses there was an emphasis on engagingwith up-to-date peer-reviewed sources rather than textbooks.

For me, grad level, whether it’s MA or PhD, that’s the professional league . . . I have the same expectations andrequirements that I have for a peer reviewed paper . . . I want to see quality and recentness of the sources.(Jacques, Professor, interview).

One course pack contained a number of the readings that were drafts of articles in press, while another courseprovided a syllabus containing a full page of references and websites of internationally recognized journals in the field.In the first class, the course professor encouraged all students to acquaint themselves with these resources as soon aspossible. Not only did this signal to students that as developing professionals they were expected to keep abreast of thelatest knowledge claims in their fields, but the professors also provided some of the means for them to do so. All of thereadings, resources and conversations served as a means of scaffolding the students’ access to their professionalcommunity.

One aspect of the professors’ literacy practices that we wanted to learn about concerned the writing tasks that theyvalued. From our interview data as well as from the course outlines, it was clear that for most of the professors theheart of academic writing was the development of an argued claim to knowledge. This is in keeping with other studiesof academic writing tasks that have reported that the research essay is the most prevalent writing assignment foruniversity students across a wide range of disciplines (Casanave & Hubbard, 1992; Cooper & Bikowski, 2007;Horowitz, 1986). In our data from many of the course documents and class lectures, the term argument repeatedlycollocated with the role of author and the adoption of a critical stance, suggesting a strong link between academicauthorship and the development of arguments. In a set of reading guidelines given to the students, one course professorhad highlighted the human agent behind the published source by foregrounding the author of the text. Professorsadvised their students to avoid those rhetorical practices that might lead a writer away from taking a position on anissue:

The emphasis in your essay should be on critical analysis. Excessive description, the mere chronicling ofevents, rhetorical posturing and grandstanding should all be avoided. (Communication, course outline, p. 15)

The development of a critical perspective was emphasized as the faculty frequently highlighted the importance ofcreating new meanings on the basis of, and against, the old meanings they would encounter in published sources. Inconjunction with this, professors stressed the need to ‘hear’ the student’s own voice in the text.

As one path to the development of a personal argument, the students were encouraged to relate what theyunderstood from the readings and class discussions to their own lived experiences. At the same time, in the processthey were seen to be acquiring new vocabulary and concepts that would allow them to ‘‘speak’’ the discipline.

. Tell me about what’s going on for you in relation to the stuff that we’ve been exploring. Please share yourown experience, . . . [I want] to get them to ask themselves, ‘‘How does this relate to my own experience?What do I already know? What have I already experienced since this course started which speaks to thesetopics? When I say experience, I’m not necessarily referring to what they’ve read. It might be a conversationthey had in class or out of class . . . I also ask them to do this exploration by using an enriched vocabulary. SoI’m saying you can talk about these things now in ways that you couldn’t a few weeks ago. (Daniel, Professor,interview)

From their perspective as educators, professors seemed to regard students’ inappropriate citation more as a learningissue, suggesting that it had to do with students’ socialization into the academic disciplines and their gradually takingup of disciplinary ways of speaking and writing. They articulated a rich and complex understanding of the reasons thatmight explain students’ problematic textual appropriations.

Professors discussed a range of reasons for students’ inappropriate source usage. One professor, for instance,enumerated context difficulty, language competence, and time pressure as playing a role:

I think for ESL students materials are difficult to read. It’s even challenging for students for whom English isa first language. For students for whom English is a second language, they’re having difficulty dealing withsubject matter and with language and with construction of the ideas. So that’s there. There’s just the learning


involved. And I think because of that pressure or challenge, there may be the propensity . . . out of exhaustionor struggle . . . [to say] this paragraph says it so well. I can’t say any other way, so I’ll just put that in. I thinkit’s really part and parcel of the learning process. (Catherine, Professor, interview)

Another professor attributed students’ poor citation practices to their unfamiliarity with academic genres ingraduate school. Still another invoked students’ unfamiliarity with the scholarly conversations in the field that resultedin their not knowing which ideas might be considered common knowledge and which were not.

Repeatedly in our conversations, they stressed that they saw no evidence of intention to deceive on the part of thestudents. Overall, the faculty members’ response to their students’ difficulties with referencing was situated andpedagogic. They understood appropriate source attributions to be part of learning. This attitude was borne out inpractice since none of the students in the study whose essays contained transgressive textual borrowings was accusedof plagiarism.

Commentary. The professors expected the students to write from an authorial stance while demonstrating famil-iarity with the research literature, and at the same time displaying an ‘‘evaluative orientation’’ (Maguire, 1998) thatallowed them to assess the arguments put forth in published texts. They viewed the students as professionals-in-training who were expected to treat published sources as authored claims to knowledge and be critically engaged withthem rather than to take them as absolute truth (Hass & Flower, 1988; Spivey & King, 1989). The professors viewedstudents’ textual appropriation and source attribution as one of those ‘‘community’’ practices that resides in a web ofcomplex relations and develops over time.

In the three courses observed in this study, however, there was little explicit discussion of the rhetoricaldimension of knowledge production. While, two of the professors provided some information about this dimensionof knowledge production, there was actually little discussion of it during the course. Generally, the focus was onsubject matter, and though one could observe professional practices embedded in course discussions, requirements,or lectures, these were largely implicit. The writing assignments were mostly one shot. That is, the students wouldselect the topic in consultation with the professor, and while initially there would be some back and forth with theprofessor about the topic and approach, the students would go off and write the paper, and then submit it on the duedate. The comments and feedback that professors provided in such an arrangement came too late to be applied intheir own courses. Perhaps they trusted that the students would heed those comments when writing papers forsubsequent courses.

3.2. The international students: performing as ethical learners

While the professors expected the students to adopt an authorial stance, the students’ writing exhibitedheavy borrowing from sources and consisted mainly of reports of published sources with little evidence ofcreativity or authorial voice. This appeared to be not only because of their difficulties with English but alsobecause of their unfamiliarity with the ways of thinking, speaking, and writing associated with the specificsubject areas.

With chunks of material culled from sources and patched together without being integrated into a clear line ofargument, their own voices were almost completely marginalized by the authoritative voices of published authors. Thefollowing excerpts from the students’ papers illustrate this:

When the term globalization has itself become even more globalised, the assumptions that communication viaadvertising had replaced ideological solemnity are being reshaped. Postmodern theorists emphasize howtraditional structures of government and politics are out of step with contemporary cultural patterns andidentity processes. Maybe, as the French theorist Gilles Lipovetsky points in his last publications we are notcurrently experiencing postmodern times but hypermodern ones. Times when we are experiencing thereconciliation of the three main axioms that characterize Modernity: Pluralist Democracy, Market, andTechno-scientific efficiency.

(Excerpt from Amorita’s paper, italics original, boldface added)

For this writing assignment, Amorita has taken sentences from three separate sources and used them to create hertext. Such a textual weave was not well received, as evidenced by the written feedback from her professor:


When writing a paper one should avoid simply weaving together different quotations to tell the story.Quotations should only be used to back-up or reinforce the argument one is trying to develop. (Professor’sfeedback on Amorita’s paper)

A variant of this approach appears in the writing of another student:

On the credibility building and ethical problems on the blog, Meyer argued: Ethical standards develop overtime through a natural selection process. Rules that work tend to be kept, while those that cause confusioneventually get dropped or repaired. So it is not surprising that a medium as new as blogging would be ina period of moral confusion.

‘‘Once a blogger makes a post, that post should be treated as if it were carved in stone, and bloggers havea duty never to erase their posts . . . warts and all,’’

When it comes to building trust, blogging’s needs are no different from those of the old journalism. It helps ifyou know what you are talking about. And so one way for a journalist, blogger or mainstream, to earn andkeep a reputation is by demonstrating subject matter competence.

(Lee’s paper, bold face added)

This writer relies on the language and ideas of one source to create his text. One professor characterized this qualityas ‘‘a telephone book directory of quotes’’ (Catherine, Professor, interview) while another described it as being merely‘‘secretaries to published authors, to the experts in the field’’ (Mark, Professor, interview). In both of the samplepapers, whether drawing on one or several published sources, the student writers relied completely on the language ofthe published authors to produce their own texts.

Some of the students revealed cultural, educational, and professional dispositions that oriented them differently totext, knowledge, and authorship. During the text-based interviews with the students, we were able to hear why thestudents selected certain references as they readily discussed their strategies. In the following, Hako described whyshe drew so heavily on Papacharissi’s writings.

Within the all articles I have cited she [Papacharissi] has the most similar idea to mine and yeah so I use hisjournal as the main paper and I just borrow some others a little bit . . . To be really honest, I didn’t have muchtime to explore other books in the library or on the internet. (Hako, Student, interview)

While time constraints were an important factor in their experience, they also selected their references toaccomplish what they understood as normative academic practice.

Because I need to make it academic . . . Every scholar quote others . . . and second of all without any references it’sjust a journal not an essay. It’s like writing your idea without any provement. (Hako, Student, interview)

Here Hako has revealed her understanding of the central role of argument in academic writing, ‘‘without referencesit is just a journal.’’ The students also chose their references in order to be recognized by their professors as diligent,and knowledgeable:

I want to show Duncan I’ve read the articles. I want to show him I know what all of these articles and bookshave said about the importance of internet in forming the public sphere. (Salma, Student, interview)

We were also interested in how the students understood and applied the rules pertaining to references and citationsinto their writing.

One of my professors told me how to make citation from journal, a book it’s name is APA. Something likethat. It is very strict how to use names, people’s name, journal name, article name . . . You should write thejournal which year, which page something like that. (Lee, Student, interview)

There is a sense from such responses that the students considered the process of source attribution mainly asa formal textual feature that could be accomplished by strict adherence to established rules and guidelines for propercitation. In the course of the discussions of their written assignments during the text-based interviews, the students alsomade repeated references to plagiarism asserting that they worried about being accused of cheating. For example, onestudent paper contained the following:


The only drawback of the Internet is related to the gap between the have and the have-nots (Papacharissi,2002) . it does not even guarantee increased political activity or enlightened political discourse (Papa-charissi, 2002; p. 13) . . . On the other hand, it also fragmentize the universe of users and threaten tooveremphasize [our] differences and downplay or even restrict [our] commonalities (Papacharissi, 2002,p. 17). (Salma’s paper, boldface added)

When asked specifically about this pattern of citation, she responded:

I thought that everything was known to [the professor] because I probably said what authors said . . . I know hehas read enough about this and he can identify [and say] ‘‘Oh, yeah, this idea is not yours! This idea you’vetaken from another person!’’ (Salma, Student, interview)

Further conversations revealed that the students appeared to have adopted a stance that seemed to dominate theirwriting, a stance devoted to showing that they would not steal other people’s property.

Oh yes, because in my country Japan . . . borrowing from other is not so strictly . . . but it’s plagiarism so I haveto care a lot that I’m not stealing words just borrowing them. I put some other words for other words. (Hako,student, interview)

When I am really sure that these ideas came from this author, I go to the paper so when I remember thatsomeone they could identify . . . because I knew that I had to do that because of the plagiarism. (Salma,student, interview)

Because I have to. Because if I don’t I’m afraid it’s going to be taken as plagiarism. (Amorita, Student,interview)

Given this preoccupation, we were interested in learning more about their familiarity and experience withplagiarism. Each of the students had had prior experience with academic guidelines about plagiarism. Countries suchas Japan and Spain have intellectual property and copyright right laws very similar to those of North America. BothSalma and Amorita did their undergraduate studies in Spanish in different countries. Salma saw the practice sheexperienced in Spain as similar to the Canadian university model. It was similar for Amorita in Chile, but she alsopointed out an important difference:

[In my country] they tell, ‘‘Do not copy please.’’ Do not do the copy and paste thing . . . they teach you how toquote and reference and cite. Yes. They teach you that. They teach you the way, but they don’t tell you if youdon’t do this, you’re going to be expelled. (Amorita, Student, interview, italics added)

When Lee reflected on writing and referencing in his home country, China, he was able to recognize a practice thathad been invisible to him as an undergraduate.

When I was at my university not strict on this but you know now just these days when I go back to see someChinese journals, I found out, yes they are using the same, because you know at that time I was an under-graduate so they were not very strict for this. (Lee, Student, interview)

Hako explained that in Japan while her teachers had discussed the topic of plagiarism, it was not with the samedegree of stress on wrongdoing as in Canada. There are many possible explanations for the heightened sense ofwrongdoing that the students experienced, but one clear source was evidenced in Amorita’s emotional response towhether she, as a new graduate student in Canada, had received any explicit instructions about the practice from theuniversity as part of her program. ‘‘Yes, like 500 times!’’

Commentary. The international students in this study, while familiar with the conventions of academic writing intheir home countries, had limited experience in the type of writing that is privileged in North American English-medium universities. For these students, the tone and authoritative stance of the university plagiarism policies createdconsiderable anxiety that seemed to have distracted them from the more important aspects of academic writing. Apartfrom perpetuating fear of sanctions, the institutional plagiarism policies appeared to have preoccupied the studentswith performing the identity of a moral writer. It is important to point out that, while these policies on their own do notconstitute a discourse, there are in fact ‘‘traces of discourses’’ (Brodkey, 1987; Fairclough, 1992) operating in them,the most visible of which is a discourse of morality. This is evident in the way these policies describe plagiarism as


a form of academic dishonesty (Howard, 1995; Valentine, 2006; Zwagerman, 2008). Such a representation has anautomatic disciplining function by dichotomizing students into ethical or unethical writers. The frequent messagesthat the students had been receiving had overly preoccupied them with performing the identity of moral writer at theexpense of ignoring the many messages that the professors conveyed to them about what constituted effective writing.

The students’ papers, in conjunction with their statements, highlighted the gap between the pedagogical goals oftheir professors, who wanted to get them to write authoritatively with appropriate referencing as one of the hallmarks ofthis kind of writing, and students’ perspective of avoiding an accusation of fraud. The students’ explanations of sourceuse and attribution suggested that avoiding accusations of plagiarism were more prevalent in their decision-making thanarticulating a critical disposition towards their readings in order to add their voice to an ongoing academic conversation.

3.3. The institution: performing as mystifying authority

The university, as part of its mandate, has an institutional responsibility to uphold academic standards and ensureacademic integrity. From its perspective, an increase in plagiarism presents a clear threat of erosion of those standards.As part of a strategy to stem the tide, many universities provide information about plagiarism during their orientationsessions for incoming undergraduate and graduate students. The university in our study adopted a variety of strategiesto publicize information about plagiarism including using the activities during the orientation week to disseminatewarnings, directives, and advice on the matter. Many events during the university orientation week includeddescriptions of plagiarism, its consequences, and strategies to avoid plagiarism. One of the international students inour study described her experience of the orientation activities:

Every day before I started classes there was like this international students’ session, and there was the generalone, the graduate studies one, the barbecue one. And in every session they give you this yellow sheet aboutplagiarism saying, ‘‘It’s a crime; you don’t do this.’’ (Amorita, Student, interview)

The yellow sheet to which she referred above is a widely distributed university brochure that was visible in thehallways and on the bulletins boards in many of the classrooms and is similar in content to those found in universitiesacross the English speaking world (Pecorari, 2001; Yamada, 2003). Couched in punitive language, the brochuredefines plagiarism and offers examples of paraphrasing, summarizing, and correct referencing as strategies to avoidplagiarism. While the brochure appears in different shapes and colours, the content remains the same, underlining theinstitutional perspective on texts, writers, and their relations. This brochure also mandates professors to detect andtreat students’ inappropriate source attribution as plagiarism. Amorita’s description of the university orientationsession designed specifically for graduate students provides additional details of the atmosphere that was created:

For graduate studies we had a large speech from the director of the FPGS [Faculty of Postdoctoral andGraduate Studies] about plagiarism and all the concern about it. But it makes me think that there is a lot ofplagiarism here. I don’t know if it’s real but the lady told us that they had found several cases last year so we’regoing through this and we’re going to be hard and you have do this properly because last year she told us therewas a lot. (Amorita, Student, interview)

The warning messages that the students received about their use of sources and plagiarism at the institutional level,were at the same time reiterated in their academic courses as the faculty were required to incorporate warnings aboutplagiarism in their course outlines. Most faculty members complied by copy-pasting a section from universitybrochure or by incorporating the URL of the electronic version of the brochure in their course outlines. They did so,however, with a large degree of discomfort as they believed that including these admonitions about plagiarisminterfered with their pedagogical goals. They described themselves as conflicted as they had to simultaneously deploytwo competing discourses: one legalistic and one educational:

I felt like a security guard . . . My aesthetic or affective response for not wanting to include it was becausethat’s just not the way that I want to enter into a relationship with my students when I’m teaching in a class andam learning with them. (Mary, Professor, interview)

It was felt that the intrusion of the legalistic policy jeopardized their goal to support their graduate students andultimately receive them as professional colleagues. In this regard, it was felt to negatively impact the student-professorrelationship:


I didn’t want to telegraph to the students that I thought they might engage in fraud. (Jamie, Professor,interview)

In one department, professors were required to have the students sign and submit a Fraud Declaration attesting tothe originality of their written submissions and explicitly stating that they did not commit academic fraud. Theinternational students found this emphasis strange, and spoke as if their intertextual practices were under surveillance.

I was so worried actually because the paper I signed was some kind of warning you do not do any plagiarism.So it was always there. (Salma, Student, interview)

Hako found submitting the Fraud Declaration disturbing, and was ‘‘kind of shocked’’ when the professor requiredit. Lee too explained that he was disturbed when he looked up the meaning of ‘‘affidavit’’ after he went through theFraud Declaration at home later on. Amorita explained that following the orientation sessions, whenever she wrote forher courses, she was especially careful and anxious about documenting her borrowings in order to avoid an accusationof plagiarism. Thus, it may be the case that these warnings were effective in bringing students’ attention to theimportance of documenting one’s sources in academic writing: At the same time, however, they bear some respon-sibility for leading the students to be excessively preoccupied with referencing sources simply to guard againstcharges of plagiarism, as seen from the over-citation in a number of their written assignments.

4. Concluding discussion

In this study we were interested in how institutional plagiarism policies interacted with ESL students’ academicwriting and how those policies framed the professor-student relationships. In our view the institutional plagiarismpolicies that the students experienced in their course assignments and the broader institutional context reduced thecomplex phenomenon of plagiarism that is ‘‘centrally concerned with questions of language, identity, education, andknowledge’’ (Chandrasoma et al., 2004, p. 174) to the mechanics of documentation, while directing students’attentions to performing the identity of a moral writer (Valentine, 2006; Zwagerman, 2008). While trivializing ‘‘thecomplex meanings of [academic] authorship attribution’’ (Fisk, 2006, p. 52), the institutional documents withheldimportant information from the international students in this study, who were in the early stages of their relationshipwith North American academic writing. The institutional documents were misleading to the students in that theyprompted the students to think that academic attribution was more about avoiding plagiarism than respondingcreatively to the ideas of others. Focused on plagiarism avoidance, the documents provided little information on therhetorical uses of prior texts in the collaborative act of knowledge construction. While stripping the context from theact of writing, the documents provided little information on the epistemological assumptions or the rhetoricalpurposes of successful writing in academia. They conveyed virtually no information about the core assumptions thatunderpin professional literacy practices, namely, that knowledge is contingent, and that all published sources,regardless of their authors, are to be approached as provisional claims to truth that are always subject to rationalscrutiny (Dillon, 1991; Toulmin, 1958). That professional academic writers bring a complex set of assumptions to theact of writing can be highlighted by the fact that writers use citations to achieve multiple pragmatic functions, of whichcrediting other authors is but one (Harwood, 2008). These omissions about academic writing were therefore not onlymisleading to the students, but they also diminished the professors’ efforts to socialize the students into privilegedliteracy practices.

These silences about implicit genre rules and conventions are in fact examples of what Lillis (1999) has describedas the ‘‘institutional practice of mystery’’ that mystify academic writing and thereby work ‘‘against those least familiarwith the conventions surrounding academic writing’’ (p. 127). The result is that they negatively impact the academicsuccess of ESL students who may have less experience with the argumentative literacy tradition so dominant in NorthAmerican academia (Farr, 1993; Olson, 1977). As we reflected on the ways in which university plagiarism policiesintersected with student writing and educational practice, we asked ourselves what might mitigate these effects. In ourview, the fact that most professors resisted taking up the institutional plagiarism policies when reacting to students’inappropriate textual borrowing certainly limited the damage. Nonetheless, the professors were simultaneouslyundermined and even complicit when they reinforced the institutional view by passively incorporating it in theircourse outlines. To counter the exclusionary function of university policies that gets enacted through their silences onwhat underpins academic writing, the faculty could fill in some of the blanks by discussing the rhetorical and


epistemological assumptions that go with the use of sources. However, some of these assumptions are so tacitlyadhered to that many content area professors might not be able to articulate to their students. This is where explicitdiscussion of the fundamentals of academic writing in EAP classes becomes crucial for international students.

In this study, the repeated exhortations to the students to connect the readings to their own lives did not includeproviding them with writing alternatives that would enable them to tell their stories. The only valid rhetorical product,reasoned arguments with a critical stance, in effect muted their voices and pushed the students toward reproducing thewords of published authors. Of the fifteen professors interviewed in this study, only two spoke of the importance ofusing alternative writing tasks and developing rhetorical modes different from the argumentative mode to createa space for writing that could be more reflective and expressive.

While the introduction of multiple forms of writing into the university classroom could serve as an importantcatalyst toward creating a pedagogy that would align it with a more dialogic view of developing the authorial voice sovalued by the professors in this study, we are not suggesting that professors teach these multiple forms as instances ofspecific genres (Freedman, 1993). Rather, we are suggesting that disciplinary professors enlarge their educationalresponsibilities to include participating with their students in a transformative pedagogy that is at once dialogic anddynamic. Such an undertaking would understand learning ‘‘as a recursive, elaborative process of opening up newspaces of possibility by exploring current spaces’’ and teaching as ‘‘participating in the transformation of what is’’(Davis, 2004, p. 184). We think this approach could create a more generative relationship and ultimately contributeimportantly to the development of accomplished academic writers.

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Further readings

Australian scholars, beset with plagiarism, inaugurate new journal on academic integrity. (2006). The Chronicle of Higher Education p. 18.

Ali R. Abasi is an Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Maryland, USA.

His primary research interest is writing in academic and workplace settings.

Barbara Graves is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her main research interest is theories of mind.

academic literacy and plagiarism: conversations with international graduate students and...

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