I prepare overseas students to enter HE study, including teaching them about
intertextuality. I've looked at some of their problems, too, and discussed
some of these issues with our lecturers here.
There are two areas that I'd like to highlight for this mailing list. The
first is that many overseas students from east Asia in particular have never
been assessed by out-of-class papers at all, or only to a very limited
extent in their mother tongue courses, much less in English. Chinese
undergraduates, for example, have to write an extended essay (dissertation)
at the end of their UG study, but for many, that is the only out-of-class
paper they write.
English writing skill is assessed in their home countries almost exclusively
by examination, usually by writing an argumentative piece along the lines of
"Smoking in public should be banned."
My point is that the rules for the use of source material are very different
for exams and for out-of-class papers. (That's of course for home, as well
as overseas, students.) If you haven't written a secondary source paper out
of class, you're going to mess up the way you handle your sources.
The second area that I'd like to mention is that, while IELTS exam group
(UCLES, British Council & IELTS Australia) recommends additional preparation
for students who score below IELTS 7.0 for everything except "linguistically
less demanding" academic courses (e.g., pure maths & agriculture), many
courses require an IELTS 6.5 or less. This is for competitive reasons--we
all need the money that these students provide. If we insist on a 7.0,
they'll go elsewhere.
A student who has a 6.5 probably has a 6.0 in writing, perhaps less.
Basically, they can't write well. They have a limited vocabulary and don't
have the resources necessary for successful paraphrasing. You need
excellent reading skills, and then substantial grammatical skills to
transform the original into a new text. Those skills aren't generally found
at the level we're accepting students at.
Erik Borg
-----Original Message-----
From: Jude Carroll [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2004 10:36 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Article in today's telegraph
Dear Bobbie,
Thanks for doing that scanning, Bobbie. I meant to make an effort to
find the article and you saved me time.
I also agree with your comments that "we could do a lot more about this
problem" which I take to mean the problem of institutions just sort of
giving up on dealing with plagiarism or devising policies and procedures
that treat it as an ordinary, reasonably high-volume part of everyday
life.
There are some good models about of institutions who DO deal with the
problems of under-reporting and the pressures to look away rather than
deal with individual cases. But many have procedures that are more
suitable to the one-off surprises of finding a case that may have been
the norm in the 1980s. I agree that the June conference should keep
this these alive and maybe encourage papers to address this.
I also noticed your comment, Bobbie, about cultural differences in the
way academic work is derived, presented and assessed. You write that
you don't want unacceptable practice excused and I agree. The thing is,
students have learned all kinds of way to show they know things, many
differing significantly from how it's done in the UK FE and HE sectors.
As far as I can see, many students need to learn new skills instead of
those that have served them well in the past on, maybe, A-level courses
or classrooms in other countries, or even out in the world of work.
That takes time. The question for me is how do we support students to
learn the new skills? How long should we wait until we insist they play
"our academic game" by "our rules" - as I believe we are perfectly
entitled to do..... eventually? How do we signal as they are practicing
these new ways that their writing is not there yet and they need to keep
on paying attention?
For me, the big issue I'm struggling with at the moment is: How can we
in FE and HE help International Students in particular feel brave
enough to try out these new ways of writing. All the research shows
that when students are stressed, under pressure or doing things they are
not sure about, they very frequently revert to strategies like copying,
memorizing, and lifting chunks from books. Even when they have been
told and told that this is not acceptable. Most International Students
are definitely stressed, under pressure to succeed, unsure of their
academic skills etc etc.
Anyone found good ways?
Jude Carroll
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