Plagiarism is a modern Western construct which arose with the introduction of copyright laws in the eighteenth century. Before this time, there was little sense of artistic "ownership". Since then, the ideas of "originality" in writing as well as the "autonomous text" have been highly valued. In the theoretical section of this dissertation I deal with plagiarism and referencing from three perspectives. After looking at problems of definition of plagiarism, I turn to the first perspective, the historical development of the notions of plagiarism and originality. Alongside this I discuss the notions of "autonomous text" and "decontextualized" language, and attempt to show that these concepts are problematic, and that language is intensely social at the levels of discourses, genres, and the word. The second angle is a snapshot of present-day writing genres, and how they deal with documentation in different ways. The third point of focus is on the development of the student writer, on whom present-day genres of academic writing, and the historically constructed notions of plagiarism converge. Here I centre on the development of the undergraduate student as a writer, and some of the things that may be happening when a student is seen to be plagiarizing. Some of these are the "alienness" of academic discourses, the hybridization of discourses, the need to "try on" academic discourses, the lack of authority of the student writer and her relationship to the authority of the sources, and the way in which languages are learned and reproduced in chunks. I look finally at what the meaning of authorship might be in an intensely social view of language, and at the complexity of developing authorial voice in writing. The dissertation is located in a postpositivist paradigm, and seeks to interpret as well as being oriented towards praxis. The research took place within the Political Studies Department at the University of Cape Town. The study included a discourse analysis of the departmental handbook, as well as analysis of academic essays, at the first year and third year level, which were selected for having problems with referencing, or having plagiarized. A few were selected for good referencing. Students who had written these essays, and tutors and lecturers who had marked them, were then interviewed. In the analysis I explore differing understandings of the role of referencing in the academic essay, what negative and positive consequences the practice of referencing and the monitoring of plagiarism have, with regard to authority and voice in student writing, what might be happening when students are thought to be plagiarizing, and what difficulties are experienced by students in developing an authorial voice when using multiple sources. The study found that there are a range of underlying causes for plagiarism in student writing, which indicate that plagiarism is more a problem of academic literacy than academic dishonesty. It also found that marking practices in detecting plagiarism may sometimes be based on problematic assumptions about the amount of background knowledge and independent ideas which students bring to their writing. I conclude by putting forward a pedagogy for plagiarism and referencing, which is based on 1) the negotiation of shared meaning around the concept of plagiarism, including an examination of assumptions linked to this concept in its monitoring and enforcement, leading to the development of written policy and guidelines emerging from this shared understanding. 2) The development of an academic literacy programme within the curriculum, with attention to the complexities of developing authorial voice whilst constructing a text based on the texts of others, with a focus on authors, which moves students towards an understanding of how knowledge is constructed.

"The Falling Scholar - Essays in the Outside" is a collection of six essays that explore the effects and affects of crisis in the contexts of academic writing. Crisis, from the Greek root word, Krinein, means "to turn;" and is applied in a variety of historical settings that allow for the writing itself to turn towards writing. As the writer, I am always in a position of turning towards, or away from the crisis as a site of learning, or of turning the crisis into something else. These essays constitute a performance-writing that attempts to expose new possibilities in meanings and interpretations through "turning," and for revealing the subject-in-process. The subject-in- process is an identity that flows in and out of each effort to address the crisis: whether personal, social, or political, each crisis is an event for turning towards what might not yet be written about how we understand ourselves as authors of our bodies. These essays are invested with a writer's vigilance, attending ceaselessly to the ways writing can refuse, deny, displace, disguise, conceal, and protect what might be revealed in writing. By locating this work in the university, I have tried to explicate the conflicts and contradictions that arise for women who are writing within the institutionalized discourses that originate in a historically misogynist vernacular. The "poetic conscience" is foregrounded as what might assist in writing outside of the traditional academic language practices, and each essay contains stories that work to disclose what is so often closed or forbidden by university writing systems. It is a writing that subjects the reader to the process of the writer's learning to write as an intellectual and as an artist - an initial effort to perform intellectual artistry as a passionate practice, and as a performance of the passionate intellectual. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

Thesis (M. A. (Language Education)) -- University of Limpopo, 2023 / This study investigated the challenges experienced by Grade 10 learners in the usage of English as the first additional language in classroom academic writing. Qualitative methodology was used to conduct this study where responses from a sample of 10 learners and 2 EFAL teachers were obtained. The participants were purposefully sampled from a secondary school in Tweefontein. The researcher collected data using the semi-structured interviews and document analysis. Selected teachers were interviewed and learners were given an essay writing task. The data was analysed using the inductive thematic data analysis method. The study‟s findings point to social media as the major factor that contributes to the learners‟ usage of social language in academic essay writing. Contraction was found to be the most common language issue in the learners‟ academic writing. The study recommends that stakeholders such as the Department of Education, teachers, parents and learners should work together in order to improve the learners‟ usage of language in academic writing.

No description available.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. May 2017 / Plagiarism is a serious problem in academia. It is prevalent in the computing discipline where students are expected to submit source code assignments as part of their assessment; hence, there is every likelihood of copying. Ideally, students can collaborate with each other to perform a programming task, but it is expected that each student submit his/her own solution for the programming task. More so, one might conclude that the interaction would make them learn programming. Unfortunately, that may not always be the case. In undergraduate courses, especially in the computer sciences, if a given class is large, it would be unfeasible for an instructor to manually check each and every assignment for probable plagiarism. Even if the class size were smaller, it is still impractical to inspect every assignment for likely plagiarism because some potentially plagiarised content could still be missed by humans. Therefore, automatically checking the source code programs for likely plagiarism is essential. There have been many proposed methods that attempt to detect source code plagiarism in undergraduate source code assignments but, an ideal system should be able to differentiate actual cases of plagiarism from coincidental similarities that usually occur in source code plagiarism. Some of the existing source code plagiarism detection systems are either not scalable, or performed better when programs are modified with a number of insertions and deletions to obfuscate plagiarism. To address this issue, a graph-based model which considers structural similarities of programs is introduced to address cases of plagiarism in programming assignments. This research study proposes an approach to measuring cases of similarities in programming assignments using an existing plagiarism detection system to find similarities in programs, and a graph-based model to annotate the programs. We describe experiments with data sets of undergraduate Java programs to inspect the programs for plagiarism and evaluate the graph-model with good precision. An evaluation of the graph-based model reveals a high rate of plagiarism in the programs and resilience to many obfuscation techniques, while false detection (coincident similarity) rarely occurred. If this detection method is adopted into use, it will aid an instructor to carry out the detection process conscientiously. / MT 2017

This study explores the use of source texts in academic writing by postgraduate students from Arab backgrounds in three UK universities. The specific focus of the study is to develop an understanding of how Arab students in the UK use sources, how they adapt to UK academic expectations, as well as how their educational backgrounds may affect their source use and adaptation to UK academic expectations. The participants in this research included a group of 22 Arab postgraduate students from three UK universities. To respond to the research aims, the data generated included 40 (already assessed by their tutors) text-based assignments collected from the participants. The analysis used Pecorari and Shaw's (2012) typology as a starting point to explore the forms of intertextuality evident in the Arab students' writing. A second source of data was interviews with seven students from the same group of participants. The analysis made use of the MAXQDA data analysis software, including facilitating the textual analysis of intertextuality in the student texts and the thematic analysis of the interview transcripts. The findings suggest that unconventional use of sources does occur among this group of students, including over-reliance on sources, patchwriting, frequent use of direct quotation, and forms of paraphrasing that rely on synonym substitution. The study further suggests that unconventional use of sources may be explained by the students' past educational experiences in their Arab home contexts. This includes a lack of written culture, low readership in the region, culture of orality, acceptability of violations of copyright, and 'traditional' teaching practices in the educational systems of the region. The study also shows how the students' educational backgrounds created transition challenges for students when arriving in the academic setting in the UK. Finally, the study presents various strategies used by this group of students to adapt to the UK academic environment. The study contributes by presenting a four level framework of intertextuality, developed from the data in this study and extending on Pecorari and Shaw's typology. This includes intertextuality on the word, sentence, paragraph, and structure levels of the students' academic writing. This expanded view of intertextuality, including a level-based framework, enhances understanding of the forms of intertextuality prevalent in these students' texts, and highlights the specific challenges these Arab students have faced in their transition to become academic writers in the UK context. The thesis also concludes with what are the lessons, as evident from this study, for UK Universities in supporting Arab students.

International students for whom English is an additional language (EAL) commonly undertake preparatory classes in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), delivered in language institutes which exist as independent commercial colleges on the margins of the university. EAP has been criticized for taking a purely pragmatic approach of ‘skilling up’ students rather than taking a critical, ‘literacies’ approach appropriate to the rapidly globalising, ‘liquid’ contexts of the twenty-first century (Doherty & Singh, 2005; Lea & Street, 2006; Luke, 2002b). In this thesis, I explore the ways in which EAP reading pedagogies in Australian universities are responding to this call for a more critical approach, asking the question: Do learning environments in EAP support the development of critical reading practices, and if so, how? In seeking answers to this question, I used an ethnographic-ecological methodology (van Lier, 2004b) to gain an understanding of reading pedagogy in three EAP learning environments. The study inevitably generated vast amounts of ‘messy’ data, including transcriptions of classes, observation notes, interviews and examples of students’ written work. Using Christie’s tools of Classroom Discourse Analysis (Christie, 2002) in combination with Engeström’s third generation Activity Theory (Engeström, 1999; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006) it was possible to generate a holistic analysis of the interaction between the multiple, intersecting elements of each environment. I argue that more attention needs to be paid to ‘critical engagement’ in EAP pedagogy. The data suggest that conditions for such a pedagogy entail a negotiation of goals; texts and tasks which present high challenge as well as high support (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005); and a positive and productive classroom community (Dörnyei & Murphey, 2003). The study challenges teachers to see their role not as ‘arbiters of meaning’, mediating texts FOR students, but as setting up learning environments which scaffold students’ direct engagement and dialogue WITH texts, so that they themselves can experience legitimate participation in constructing meaning, and develop an emerging identity as critical readers. Finally, I argue that the constraints of EAP in its marginalised position on the periphery of increasingly commercialised universities militate against the possibility of a richly critical, postcritical pedagogy. EAP can, however, begin to sow the seeds of critical reading practices, orienting students towards an active, dialogic engagement with the texts they will meet in the coming years at university.

International students for whom English is an additional language (EAL) commonly undertake preparatory classes in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), delivered in language institutes which exist as independent commercial colleges on the margins of the university. EAP has been criticized for taking a purely pragmatic approach of ‘skilling up’ students rather than taking a critical, ‘literacies’ approach appropriate to the rapidly globalising, ‘liquid’ contexts of the twenty-first century (Doherty & Singh, 2005; Lea & Street, 2006; Luke, 2002b). In this thesis, I explore the ways in which EAP reading pedagogies in Australian universities are responding to this call for a more critical approach, asking the question: Do learning environments in EAP support the development of critical reading practices, and if so, how? In seeking answers to this question, I used an ethnographic-ecological methodology (van Lier, 2004b) to gain an understanding of reading pedagogy in three EAP learning environments. The study inevitably generated vast amounts of ‘messy’ data, including transcriptions of classes, observation notes, interviews and examples of students’ written work. Using Christie’s tools of Classroom Discourse Analysis (Christie, 2002) in combination with Engeström’s third generation Activity Theory (Engeström, 1999; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006) it was possible to generate a holistic analysis of the interaction between the multiple, intersecting elements of each environment. I argue that more attention needs to be paid to ‘critical engagement’ in EAP pedagogy. The data suggest that conditions for such a pedagogy entail a negotiation of goals; texts and tasks which present high challenge as well as high support (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005); and a positive and productive classroom community (Dörnyei & Murphey, 2003). The study challenges teachers to see their role not as ‘arbiters of meaning’, mediating texts FOR students, but as setting up learning environments which scaffold students’ direct engagement and dialogue WITH texts, so that they themselves can experience legitimate participation in constructing meaning, and develop an emerging identity as critical readers. Finally, I argue that the constraints of EAP in its marginalised position on the periphery of increasingly commercialised universities militate against the possibility of a richly critical, postcritical pedagogy. EAP can, however, begin to sow the seeds of critical reading practices, orienting students towards an active, dialogic engagement with the texts they will meet in the coming years at university.

Thesis (MPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Chrystalla Mouza, School of Education. Includes bibliographical references.