Hi Mary Ellen,

You've raised a good point, and I, too, have heard colleagues say, "They're only first year students.You can't expect them to cite properly." As a teacher,  I absolutely understand the impulse not to "treat as too severe" first year students' "patchwriting" (i.e. plagaiarizing). We want students to persist in what is, admittedly, a difficult task: learning to write in another language (or even their own), and we don't want to unduly discourage them. 

However, there are a couple of problems with communicating, even implicitly, that this kind of practice is ok. The most practical problem is one of teaching standards and conventions: how students are supposed to know what's acceptable and what's not unless we tell them. And if we gloss over practices like this, and bring un-credited materials into the classroom are we not saying to them that this is an acceptable practice? Why would they think otherwise? When there is a discrepancy between what we say and what we do, students usually believe our actions.

An even more serious problem, though, is that when we implicitly accept students using others' words and ideas as a substitute for their own, we undermine the principles that underlie the standards and conventions: that writing is a way to clarify and refine one's own thinking; that people have a right to their own creative work; that scholarship is built on giving credit where credit is due. 

It's true that our present conceptualization of "ownership" of ideas has become increasingly murky in the internet age, but most of the time, we know where ideas in written form come from, and by teaching students to respect the ownership of their sources, we're also teaching them to respect their own written work. 

So I agree. We should be addressing of how to properly "borrow" another's words or ideas, and as soon as possible in students' university careers. I also agree that we have to be scrupulous in crediting any teaching materials we use.

My two cents, for what it's worth,
Linda

Linda McCloud-Bondoc
Write Site Coordinator
Office of the Vice President Academic

Athabasca University
1 University Drive
Athabasca, AB. 
Canada T9S 3A3
1-866-603-9521

----- Original Message -----
From: "M. Ellen Kerans" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, May 6, 2010 4:03:55 AM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain
Subject: Do SS learn to plagiarize in our classes?




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 

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