Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9 (2010) 80e82www.elsevier.com/locate/jeap

Book review

Review of: Technologies in the Second Language Composition Classroom, Joel Bloch. Ann Arbor: The University ofMichigan Press (2008), pp. 225. ISBN 13: 978-0-472-03210-5. US$ 24.00.

Review of: Plagiarism, the Internet and Student Learning: Improving Academic Integrity, Wendy Sutherland-Smith.New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group (2008), pp. 224. ISBN 10: 0-415-43292-6. US$ 41.95.

Given the role computer and Internet technology has assumed in academic contexts, EAP and writing instructorsno longer have the luxury of debating whether to incorporate technology in the classroom; the technology is alreadythere. Email, for example, has become a primary means of academic correspondence. Scholarly articles spendmuch of their lives in electronic format, being written and reviewed in Microsoft Word and, if published, archivedas PDF files in subscription databases. In addition, many of our students’ most significant extracurricular literacyexperiences occur online through participation in online forums, blogs, or social networking sites such as Face-book. Both books in this review help teachers and researchers address concerns arising from computer and Internettechnology in academic settings and develop pedagogical strategies to better account for its pervasive use inacademic writing.

Bloch’s Technologies in the Second Language Composition Classroom offers EAP practitioners and beginningresearchers a crash course in issues surrounding the use of technology in the writing classroom. Seasoned researchersmight not find much new material in this book, though they might find it ideal for graduate seminars and CALLworkshops. Although heavily pedagogical, Technologies is not a ‘‘how-to’’ guide. Rather, it aims to provide readerswith a ‘‘theoretical perspective that allows teachers to adapt to the challenge in balancing theory and practice’’ (p. 6).That is, Bloch directs attention away from specific technologiesdwhich change much too quickly for the snail-pacedworld of academic research and publishingdto the principles underlying their use. Further, Bloch’s book challengespractitioners to ‘‘take control of their own research agenda through every stage of implementation’’ rather than relyingon ‘‘a few elite researchers to provide answers’’ (p. 94).

Technologies consists of six chapters, each of which concludes with a set of discussion questions. The first twochapters provide a useful overview of technology-related issues, including a discussion of technology’s social andeconomic impact on literacy standards, and a survey of available technologies. Bloch contextualizes the discussion byindicating how changes in technologydwhether it be the printing press, the typewriter, or the Internetdhave alwayscaused changes in literacy skills and standards. Further, he reiterates warnings made by numerous researchers (Selfe,1999; Warschauer, 1999) about the cultural capital online literacies can have for students in academic and workplacesettings, and the resulting marginalization faced by some students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who havenot been exposed to these literate practices.

A strength of these early chapters is Bloch’s construction of a ‘‘conceptual framework for implementing thesevarious technologies’’ (p. 48), something many researchers have agreed is lacking in CALL research (Egbert & Petrie,2005). For example, when discussing issues that affect the successful implementation of technology, Bloch addresseswhether the architecturedor designdof a program or technology actually facilitates interactivity, a factor whichcould frustrate teachers’ attempts to encourage student collaboration online. Furthermore, when discussing specifictechnologies such as word processing programs and blogs in chapter 2, Bloch directs readers’ attention to ways theyalter both the writing process and the material conditions of writing. Hypertext, for example, challenges manyassumptions teachers have of writing as a single-authored, stable entity, and places more emphasis on visual aspects ofwriting than print texts do. Bloch emphasizes that the use of technology in academic writing necessitates anaccompanying theory of composition.

doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2008.12.001

81Book review / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9 (2010) 80e82

The remaining chapters detail specific technologies and related issues. Chapter 3 discusses Internet-use and coverstopics such as integrating and evaluating outside websites, using blogs and Wikis for peer review, and avoidingplagiarism. Chapter 4 focuses on ‘‘computer-mediated discourse,’’ including email, listserves, and discussion boards.This chapter also discusses whether blogs can help students bridge personal and academic writing. Of interest tograduate-level EAP instructors is chapter 5, which describes how concordance programs such as MICASE (Universityof Michigan English Language Institute), more commonly used in corpus linguistics, can be used to help studentscatalogue and learn discipline-specific vocabulary and common academic sentence structures, such as the use ofreporting verbs.

Plagiarism, The Internet, and Student Learning complements Technologies well by delving more deeply intoteachers’ perception that the Internet makes it easier for students to plagiarize. EAP specialists will particularly likehow it places plagiarism in a more global context. Wendy Sutherland-Smith explores concerns shared by many inWestern academic institutions regarding the high number of NNES international students facing disciplinaryprocedures for plagiarism. Further, she compares nuanced differences among plagiarism policies in Canada, theUnited States, England, China, and Australia. In the last part of the book (chapters 6 and 7), she draws from a large-scale, interview-based study conducted at her home university in Australia to contrast the differing perceptions ofplagiarism held by teachers and international students. Ultimately, her work deftly complicates our notions ofplagiarism, and more importantly, it foregrounds students’ perceptions of plagiarism.

The first three chapters contextualize the plagiarism debate and sketch out the history of plagiarism as a concept inacademic institutions world-wide. In chapter 1, Sutherland-Smith summarizes the varying reactions teachers andresearchers have to plagiarism, some labeling all plagiarism as intentional acts of deception, others allowing forcontributing factors, such as varying cross-cultural perceptions of textual ownership and non-native students’ unfa-miliarity with academic writing in the target language. Sutherland-Smith then constructs a ‘‘Plagiarism Continuum,’’with intentional acts of deception on one end (e.g., downloading and submitting an entire essay), unintentional acts ofappropriation on the other (e.g., ‘‘patchwriting’’), and plenty of areas for debate along the way. This conceptual model,though simple, becomes an apt metaphor for discussing plagiarism in the rest of the book.

Chapter 2 provides a fascinating history of how notions of plagiarism and intellectual property grew out of legaldiscussions of copyright law in the British court system. Sutherland-Smith then contrasts the development of copy-right law in Europe, America, and Australia to explore the slight differences between them. Chapters 3 and 4 comparepresent-day plagiarism policies in academic institutions worldwide to identify elements that are consistent across all.

Surprisingly, despite the book’s title, chapter 5 is the only chapter dedicated specifically to ‘‘Plagiarism and theInternet,’’ though it covers a wide range of issues. Sutherland-Smith opens with conflicting accounts in the researchregarding the Internet’s impact on plagiarism incidents, complicating teachers’ overwhelming perception of theInternet as ‘‘a juggernaut for academic dishonesty’’ (p. 103). It is not clear from the research, she argues, if the Internethas actually increased the frequency with which students plagiarize, though it has provided students with a newplagiarism method. Rather, she echoes the findings of suggesting that might be teachers’ anxiety about the sheervolume of available information online and the difficulties in policing its use. Further, this chapter also addresses thewidespread adoption of anti-plagiarism software such as Turnitin at universities worldwide. Using the results of a trialstudy conducted at ‘‘South Coast University’’ in Australia, Sutherland-Smith recounts teachers’ mixed reactions toTurnitin. On one hand, the software proved useful in catching most cases of students turning in another’s work.However, teachers found Turnitin often created more work for them. The program flags all incidents of textualborrowing, thus requiring teachers to sift through the color-coded reports to distinguish between intentional plagia-rism and misattribution of sources.

Most importantly, Sutherland-Smith’s book displays the disconnect between teachers’ and students’ perceptions ofplagiarism. Further, it lets international students explain for themselves why they find plagiarism policies so confusingrather than attributing motives to them. For example, Sutherland-Smith contrasts teachers’ and students’ perception ofusing material from the Internet. Overwhelmingly, teachers in her study saw no difference between textual borrowingfrom text-based and web-based sources, seeing both as needing proper citation. However, many international studentstended to see the Internet as a ‘‘free zone’’ where all material resides in the public domain (p. 120). More prob-lematically, Sutherland-Smith found that many of these student perceptions persisted even after explicit instruction onplagiarism in class, thus suggesting that these disconnects are not easily remedied by a simple plagiarism workshop.Moreover, she uses teacher interviews to demonstrate an interesting correlation between teaching styles andplagiarism incidents. That is, teachers in her study with more content-driven pedagogies who transmit information to

82 Book review / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9 (2010) 80e82

students and expect them to relay information back in written form tended to have more problems with plagiarism thanteachers emphasizing student problem-solving and reflection. This finding suggests teachers might find it moreeffective to prevent plagiarism through course design than to punish it after the fact.

Both books in this review succeed in laying groundwork for both teaching and research. That is, they not onlysatisfy the practitioner looking for insight on technology-related issues, but they encourage readers to participateactively in the research, thus providing a much-needed bridge between practice and theory.

References

Egbert, J. L., & Petrie, G. M. (Eds.). (2005). CALL research perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Selfe, C. (1999). Technology and literacy in the twenty-first century: The perils of not paying attention. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois

University Press.

University of Michigan English Language Institute. The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Retrieved November 30, 2008

from: http://lw.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/index.htm.

Warschauer, M. (1999). Electronic literacies: Language, culture, and power in online education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Steve SimpsonEnglish Department, University of New Hampshire, 95

Main Street, Durham, NH 03824, USAE-mail address: teachersimpson@gmail.com