Eliciting ELT Students’ Understanding of Plagiarism in Academic Writing

Abstract

Given that the term ‘plagiarism’ is open to multiple interpretations, resulting in confusion amongstudents and teachers alike, research that investigates the current state of empirical evidence and shedslight on students’ ability to define and detect this notion has important pedagogical implications. Thisstudy examines undergraduate English Language Teaching (ELT) students’ understanding of plagiarismin academic writing through qualitative data collection methods. After the focus group filled in the openended questionnaire, they were exposed to two sets of texts each containing an original, a plagiarized andnon-plagiarized copy. The copy in the first set featured mainly word-for-word plagiarism while the copyin the second set was plagiarized in terms of illicit paraphrasing. The students were asked to identifywhether there is any plagiarism in each copy and assess the texts regarding their acceptability in theformat of an interview and think-aloud protocols. The results of the open-ended questionnaire andinterviews were compared revealing that although all the students were able to define plagiarismcorrectly, most of them failed to identify it in the written text. The study also uncovered discrepancies inhow the students view the aforementioned types of plagiarism.© 2018 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).