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Title:
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Original Reproductions: An investigation of the source use of postgraduate second-language writers
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Author:
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Diane Pecorari
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Birmingham
, English Department
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Degree Date:
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2002
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Applied Linguistics
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Director(s):
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Martin Hewings
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Abstract:
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Plagiarism is regarded as a heinous crime within the academic community, but anecdotal evidence suggests that some writers plagiarize without intending to transgress academic conventions. This thesis reports a study of the writing of seventeen postgraduate students. The students were non-native speakers of English working toward postgraduate degrees in four academic areas: science, engineering, social science and humanities. Source reports in the student-generated texts were compared to the original sources in order to describe the relationship between the two. Interviews were also conducted with the student writers and their supervisors. The student writing was found to contain textual features which could be described as plagiarism, but the writers' accounts of their work and the textual analysis strongly suggest absence of intention to plagiarize, thus providing empirical verification of similar suggestions in the literature. Academic discipline was found to play a role in source use, along with writing skill. The findings thus have implications for the areas of academic literacy, English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) writing instruction. These implications are discussed, and include recommendation that the focus on preventing plagiarism be shifted from post facto punishment to proactive teaching.
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