Plagiarism in Their Own Words: What Chinese and American Students Say about Academic Dishonesty[1]
ZHANG Cong Department of English, Purdue University (USA)
Abstract
This study investigates perceptions of and attitudes toward plagiarism by Chinese ESL students and American students with questionnaire and interview as the main sources of data. It was found that Chinese students exhibited less knowledge of plagiarism than American students due to a lack of previous instruction. Chinese students showed different perceptions about some cases of plagiarism such as using memorized words without citing, which may have been caused by the emphasis on memorization in Chinese learning culture. However, Chinese students held similar attitudes toward plagiarism; that is, they thought it was morally wrong and should not be tolerated unless it was unintentional Based on the findings, this paper calls for Chinese scholars to spend more time addressing the problem by making it part of the curriculum.
Key words: plagiarism; student ethics; Chinese and American student comparison; perceptions and attitudes
1. Introduction
With the development of globalization, the past decade has witnessed more than a 10-fold increase in the number of international students in Western countries, including the US, UK, Australia and others (Gu & Brooks, 2008; Haan, 2009). The dramatic increase in the number of international students in Western countries has placed inter-cultural communication in the spotlight of research on second/foreign language teaching, among which one important and frequently discussed issue is international students and plagiarism. There seems a prevalent belief that international students are more prone to plagiarize than their native counterparts (Deckert, 1993; Marshall & Garry, 2006; Martin, 2012; Sowden, 2005). With an easy and quick definition being “the action or practice of taking someone else’s work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one’s own” (Oxford English Dictionary), plagiarism is in no way a simple issue. Instead, as scholars have argued, the concept of plagiarism is “fully embedded within a social, political, and cultural matrix that cannot be meaningfully separated from its interpretation”（Scollon, 1995, p. 23), and therefore “needs to be understood in terms of complex relationships between text, memory, and learning”(Pennycook, 1996, p. 201). This connection between culture, memory, learning, and plagiarism has directed scholars, attention to students from non-Western cultures, especially those from cultures that emphasize memorization and are, therefore, different from Western culture where the notions of plagiarism and text ownership were developed and which emphasizes the originality of works and creativity of authors (Pennycook, 1996).