An Investigation Into English Majors’ Awareness Of And Attitudes Toward Plagiarism In Academic Writing

With the interests in plagiarism research in academic writing increase, theresearch about plagiarism in academic writing is growing. Most researchers haveexamined plagiarism in the environment of second language writing and related toone or more factors from multiple perspectives, namely, cultural, developmental,enculturational, and disciplinary perspectives. The present study mainly discussed theeffects of developmental factor in detecting of plagiarism.The present study is designed to probe Chinese university students’ awareness ofand attitudes toward plagiarism. The participants of this study are30freshmen,30junior students and30postgraduates respectively. It attempts to explore:(1) thegeneral state that participants detect blatant plagiarism and subtle plagiarism in actualEnglish writings;(2) the attitudes they take toward those two forms of plagiarism;(3)the correlation between English proficiency of EFL learners and detecting plagiarism.This study was implemented by a plagiarism detection test. In this test, there are fourtasks that need participants to finish. Task1and task2aimed to test the participants’ability to detect the subtle plagiarism; task3and task4aimed to detect theparticipants’ ability to detect the blatant plagiarism. Each task relates to a passagewritten by a student and a foreign author. The data was collected from English majorsof two universities in Jiangxi province. Both quantitative and qualitative approachesare employed in this study. In the aspect of quantitative study, the SPSS17.0wasemployed for the statistical analysis. Descriptive analysis, frequency, and correlationanalysis were used to analyze the data in this study. In terms of qualitative study, aninterview was conducted to find the participants’ attitudes toward plagiarizers. Fourstudents from undergraduate group and another four from postgraduate group wereselected as interviewees.The study has revealed a number of main findings. Firstly, the students in thisstudy held weak awareness of plagiaristic behavior. Among them, the awareness thatparticipants held in the blatant plagiarism was much higher than the awareness theyhold in the subtle plagiarism. Secondly, participants took a negative attitude towardplagiarism. The dropping of their reevaluation scores showed that they hold a punitiveview toward plagiaristic act, no matter it belonged to blatant plagiarism or subtleplagiarism; the contents that interviewees stated after the plagiarism detection instrument also reflected they disliked the behavior of plagiarism. Thirdly, there wassignificant positive relationship between students’ proficiency and detection of blatantplagiarism. Students who had higher language proficiency were easier to detect theplagiarism than those who had lower proficiency. However, there was no significantrelationship between students’ proficiency and detection of subtle plagiarism.Based on the findings of the study, some suggestions and implications are putforward. Firstly, teachers should help students to recognize the plagiaristic behavior intheir English writing. Teachers should give students explanations of the concept ofplagiarism as clearly as possible, such as its different cultural connotations, itscommon types, ways to avoid it, and consequences of committing it. Moreover, theearlier teachers teach students the notion of plagiarism, the better it is for students.Secondly, it is necessary for English teachers to promote students’ academic writingskills by appropriate training and making efforts of themselves. Thirdly, it is useful toraise students’ authorial identity to avoid unintentional plagiarism; especially in thefreshmen.