I assume the students Mary Ellen is referring to here are EFL students, and certainly at lower levels it is considered good practice to teach students fixed phrases such as "Could you tell me the way to the..., please?" or "Please find enclosed a copy of my curriculum vitae", both of which would fall into the category of plagiarism set down by a political scientist I once worked with: "six consecutive words and you're out!" I am reminded of a set of guidelines for dealing with more or less severe cases of plagiarism that came before our university academic forum a few years ago. There was great amusement when I pointed out that a significant portion of the document was plagiarised from a lecture I had given on plagiarism a few years earlier. I also found at a university I visited some time ago that examples of appropriate source use I had created many years ago at my institution were incorporated verbatim into their materials without acknowledgment.

Becky Moore Howard, often quoted as "the expert on plagiarism" would say (did say, I was in the lecture where she said as much) that these are work documents. The rules of plagiarism don't apply to work documents in the same way as they do to academic documents. If they did, countless US universities would be wrapped up in law suits over their plagiarised 'official statements' on academic dishonesty, many of which are boiler-plated from each other. When students are taught English a foreign language, the teacher may often not have much understanding of academe, and may equally naturally assume she is not preparing those students for an academic career. Learning useful phrases by heart is not a crime when writing a letter of complaint or an application letter for a job.

Even so, a number of academic writing course books do teach boiler-plating as a strategy, notably those of the product generation, but also Swales and Feak's well known book and more recently Graf and Birkenstein's 'They say/I say'. What I think the proponents of such works would say, however, is that they advocate boiler-plating as limited to metadiscoursal moves such as "it has often been claimed that...' or 'others in contrast put forward the objection that..." What students of academic writing tend to do, in contrast, is to boilerplate content then (in an ideal world) rework it into their own words. In addition while teaching materials or policy statements may have no ambition to originality, academic assignments are expected to show some aspect of originality of thought (even if the originality is only such because the student has not read the relevant work). If I draft a set of guidelines for designing good written assignments, my aim is not to be original - indeed originality might be considered a weakness - but to closely follow existing best practice. Close resemblance to other such guidelines in terms of *content* is a virtue, not a vice. When student write a term paper, their task is rarely to imitate as closely as possible the content of other academic papers (!) 

In short, audience and purpose dictate the different rules that influence acceptable written behaviour in different genres. Maybe a place to start is by explaining that writing for different audiences means different writing behaviours. Academic English is 'a different ball game'. The rules of earlier learnt games may, if carried over, result in a foul.

John


>>> "M. Ellen Kerans" <[log in to unmask]> 6/5/10 12:03 >>>
I've just received a review of a paper written with a colleague on the topic
of how plagiarism and mosaic writing are handled by science journal
copyeditors and professional author's editors (the latter are the sorts of
editors one finds in "writing centers" but also elsewhere throughout the
non-Anglophone world). This is the world of professional writing - not
student writing - but it's nonetheless "academic".

A journal section editor (an experienced, distinguished non-native English
speaking scientist), chatting with us, makes the point that one starts doing
mosaic writing in English classes. We all know that researchers engage in
"mosaic writing" - skillfully or not - but the interesting thing was that
this editor/reviewer spontaneously mentions his English classes. One
wonders, "What did the English instructor think or do at the time?"

I've long observed that pre-university English instructors in schools or
language academies have a high tolerance for students' copying of chunks.
And of course memorizing dialogs is a time-honored practice. "Chunking" is
even described as good-language-learning behavior for the spoken language.
It's not surprising that learners transfer that good behavior to writing. In
fact, examination preparation classes for certain "certificate" exams abroad
encourage the use of boilerplate language, with personal observations
filling in the blanks. Indeed, we might examine whether corpus analysis
encourages the re-use of large chunks or frees a learner from large
"chunking" by showing an array of collocations and pattern alternatives.

 On another listserve I belong to, it was also mentioned that university
instructors do a lot of copy-paste compilation of documents these days - for
their qualifying summaries and for many class handouts, which are sometimes
re-used materials with new headings and no attribution. We don't model
attribution much, do we? 

 Here is what the editor/researcher said literally when he sent us the review
of our paper:

 In particular, the reviewer suggests that really small copy-paste
plagiarisms should not be treated too severe for E2 authors. As one of such
authors (I mean, E2 authors, not plagiarizing ones), I concur: I remember
that while learning English, this was one of the tools to avoid too many (or
severe) mistakes. Of course, I always tried to do as much revision as
possible, but I can imagine a situation that a person with poor English and
no one to help is simply afraid to edit "pretty sentences" (in such person's
eyes-you would call them correct sentences) too much. 

 

Any comments?

 

1) Shouldn't we make more of an effort to correctly mark the provenance of
materials we take into the classroom?

2) Shouldn't our teacher trainers be raising this point? (I can't recall
that mine did.)

3) Shouldn't we begin to address the issue of idea and phrasing ownership in
lower intermediate writing exercises?

4) Otherwise, don't learners have to unlearn behaviors we've tolerated, even
rewarded with "certificates" or good grades?

 

 

 

 

Mary Ellen Kerans

Translation & Editing - Writing & Education

Barcelona, Spain

Tel/Fax: 34 934 080997

 <mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask] or

 <mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask] 

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