Dear List Members,
A question I would like to pose to the list.
Do members feel that more latitude regarding plagiarism should be given to
non-native speakers of English than native speakers?
I would be interested in knowing list members opinions.
I sometimes just wonder if too much is asked of some non-native speakers
because lack of language is an extra barrier they have to face.
Regards,
Russ Kent
-----Original Message-----
From: European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing -
discussions [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Linda McPhee
Sent: 11 May 2010 10:38
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: teaching 'own ideas', was Do SS learn to plagiarize in our classes?
>
> Rebel Palm wrote:
>
>> ... By the time they reach graduate school, these students have had a
career of being able to get away with throwing other people's (some
expert's) ideas at a paper, writing it once (no revisions), with very little
effort spent on original thought. Some of them come to me perplexed at a
prof's demand for your "own ideas." They say, "no one's ever told me I get
to have my own ideas." And this is grad school!
About teaching 'own ideas'
One thing I learned from an undergrad writing course (I swore I'd never
forget that teacher's name, and I want to give her credit, but I just can't
right now; Mary something) was to keep a notebook on my thinking. She had us
finish each class by writing down three questions related to the lesson.
These could not be questions that could be answered by any equivalent of
googling them (well, that didn't exist then, but you know what I mean). At
the end of the week we had 9 questions each, and our weekend assignment was
to choose the most interesting one, and write a one page exploration of it.
Not an 'answer', an exploration.
She would collect these on Mondays and give them back on Tuesdays, so she
was skimming them to be sure that we were asking real questions and
exploring them honestly. Sometimes there was a little checkmark, and
sometimes a short comment about this or that aspect, but she wasn't putting
a lot of time into them.
I think she may have used them as well to get inspiration for exam
questions... at least, several questions closely related to some of mine
ended up on our mid-term and final (and hey, I'd already thought about them,
so that was lucky for me). Maybe she didn't do that consciously, because in
later classes the same thing happened, and those instructors never knew
about the notebooks.
This system worked so well for my thinking processes that after that
semester I did it in all my classes... and right through grad school, though
by then I would jot questions into the notebook whenever they crossed my
mind, rather than at a set time. I only taught undergrads two years, but I
taught them this as a survival skill -- sometimes groups had to create the
questions based their favourite class, sometimes on my class. Nearly all of
them liked it.
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