Plagiarism is a difficult issue to make L1 writers aware of (to explain what it is, how they might be committing it, and what the real and the threatened repercussions are). It has become a threat in U.S. classrooms, with every high school and university handbook including a clause with scare-tactics on plagiarism and academic dishonesty. This is still a concept we have to teach (or re-teach or remind students of) in L1 writing—and although our texts this week include a lot of examples of cultural differences (especially from Asian cultures), I think it’s important to remember that this is not something that is solved in English composition classrooms of native speakers. It’s the whole issue that we’re transferring, mixing in some culture, some long-standing traditions, and some variation of a language barrier.
I thought of something as I sat down to post: I recently started including end citations here, on this blog. I did so for two reasons: 1) I realized that having the text cited directly here might be useful to any unlikely wandering readers and to myself in case of any future academic perusal back through these posts; and 2) some notion of “academic respect” has been drilled into me, and the need to fully credit quotations and ideas could not be ignored—that’s what I want to see this feeling as anyway. But is it academic respect or fear of Big Brother, fear that Casanave is going to bring a lawsuit against me for posting her name and her words in my blog? I hate to say so, but I guess that fear works, at least for some law-abiding grad students.
Pennycook situates plagiarism as coming out of Western cultural notions; he does well in explaining a brief history of authorship, textual borrowings, and changing perceptions before going into more detail about the interviews he did and situations he saw in his own (and others’) teaching experiences. His examples of historical borrowing and imitation made me think of Casanave’s recommended functional phrases (184), which can be (and are) recycled throughout academia, found in articles and books written by students and professionals alike.
Setting up the complex background behind this idea is necessary to comprehend what issues may arise in an L2 classroom—and it is informative in order to think of effective ways of confronting those issues.
Pennycook doesn’t necessarily provide an answer to the L2 dilemma on how to teach and treat plagiarism and textual borrowing (in spite of his opening anecdote, which seems to suggest that he’ll give a pragmatic explanation on what to do when your student has knowingly/unknowingly plagiarized). He is most insistent on reminding us that, “All language learning is to some extent a process of borrowing others’ words and we need to be flexible, not dogmatic, about where we draw boundaries between acceptable or unacceptable textual borrowings” (227). That is, it’s up to each of us, in our own classrooms, bound by whatever university rules or cultural norms we are immersed in.
Casanave seems to suggest (as just the title of the chapter shows), that engaging the students on the issue is one of the best approaches. That is, as teachers, we must make our students aware of cultural perspectives on this issue, and we should either inform them or have them investigate the reasons for plagiarism and the reasons for condemning it. She also suggests that L2 teachers need to prep for any problems in things such as plagiarism when assigning some task (178).
Much of the best advice that I’ve gathered from the readings in this course thus far, in fact, hold that same idea at the core: the students don’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, isolated from the fact that there is no “answer.” That is, if a teacher is working abroad and is unsure about how to treat plagiarism, the teacher should bring the problem to the students’ attention as well—not just on a case-by-case basis, either, but as a whole class, facing the situation. If we ever get a chance to get into this debatable approach in class, I know there will be various sides and arguments, and I’d like to bring up one here: how much of this can practically be explained to an ESL class in English (or an L2 class in the L2)? It varies by level, of course. But is it better to address it in the L2, no matter the level of the students, or is it ever better to explain or bring it up in the L1?
Sources:
Casanave, Christine Pearson. Controversies in Second Language Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2004. Print. Michigan Ser. on Teaching Multilingual Writers.
Pennycook, Alastair. "Borrowing Others' Words: Text, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism." TESOL Quarterly 30.2 (Summer 1996): 201-30. Web.
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