4. Conclusion
As Piety (2002, as cited in Bamford & Sergiou, 2005, p. 21) remarks, plagiarism “is subjective... what is plagiarism to one person is not necessarily plagiarism to another,”especially to people from a non-Western culture background. Therefore, there has been a controversy over whether Chinese students have different perceptions of and hold different attitudes toward plagiarism from their native English-speaking counterparts. To answer this question, this paper, by surveying 27 Chinese students and 17 American students enrolled in a large public university in the US and interviewing six of the Chinese participants and four of the Americans, found that Chinese students did demonstrate differences from American students. These differences mainly reflect previous instruction received on plagiarism and the perceptions of some cases as plagiarism and their acceptability. It was found that Chinese students received little instruction on plagiarism before entering the university except for the five who received their high school education in America. In contrast, all American students received instruction explaining what plagiarism is and the proper ways of citing and referencing. This lack of instruction caused Chinese students to not have a clear understanding of plagiarism, as demonstrated by the definitions they provided for plagiarism, their judgments on the ten cases, and their comments during the interviews. As for the differences in the perceptions of the cases, the distinct one is “using memorized words from textbooks without citing.” Most Chinese students believed this was not plagiarism, and this may have been influenced by the emphasis on memorization of Chinese learning culture.
However, the differences in Chinese students’ perceptions of some kinds of plagiarism should not lead to the conclusion that they tend to plagiarize, because the Chinese students could recognize blatant copying and considered it plagiarism and thus unacceptable. Similarly, they believed plagiarism was morally wrong and should not be tolerated unless it was unintentional. These results indicate that Chinese students lack sufficient knowledge of plagiarism and may have been influenced by their culture and Chinese writing style. However, their acknowledgement of the wrongness of plagiarism indicates that they deserve more attention, education, and instruction instead of stereotype, stigma, and punishment. Therefore, scholars in Western countries where the notion of plagiarism originated from, in the future teaching of English as a second language to Chinese students, need to show more understanding toward Chinese students, and judge suspicious cases of plagiarism “on the ground of student effort spent in researching and writing, rather than on the formalities of citation”（Shei, 2005, p. 97).