The Complexity Of Plagiarism: Chinese EFL Students' Source Use In Academic Writing

Non-native English writers are frequently accused of plagiarism. But there are few studies systematically examining plagiarism in EFL writers' academic writing and satisfactorily explaining the issue in a L2 context. Thus, taking Pennycook's (1994, 1996) multidimensional theoretical stance, the study makes a close examination of Chinese EFL writers' source use in academic writing and explores the reasons for their plagiarizing act.Text analysis was conducted to investigate textual borrowing behavior in Chinese EFL students' academic writing. Writing samples were extracted from 10 M.A. theses randomly taken from one Chinese university library. Through the comparison of the citations in the writing samples with their sources, the frequencies of different citing strategies were counted and the percentages of unattributed repeated words were calculated at three levels. Then, field research was carried out to look into the reasons for plagiarism in which in-depth interviews were made with 10 English-majored postgraduate students.The results of text analysis indicated that plagiarism was a very serious and prevalent problem. Among the compared citations, 77．3% were inappropriate. No sample text was free form the charge of plagiarism. The percentage of inappropriate citations in each sample averaged 71%. Moreover, about 80% of the inappropriate citations contained more than 70% repeated words without due attribution. Overall, the average percentage of illegally repeated words was 80．4% in the compared parts and 35．4% in the whole sample text. Field research demonstrated that plagiarism is a complex issue involving various factors, on which basis a tentative model is proposed, recognizing that plagiarism among Chinese EFL academic writers can be interpreted in the cultural context, the linguistic context, the institutional context, and the affective context. The cultural context refers to the broadened understanding of textual ownership by Chinese students under the influence of collective culture. The linguistic context is composed of their limited English ability and the high linguistic skills required by academic writing, such as critical reading and paraphrasing. The institutional context expresses their learning environment in which plagiarism is prevalent among scholars and they don't receive sufficient instruction on source use. The affective context denotes the specific emotions they have in the processing of academic writing, including indifferent attitudes towards citing under the influence of the negative plagiarism-prevalent academic environment, labor-saving feelings in face of the difficulties of academic writing and the deficiencies in their language ability, and specific concerns about either the construction of their writer identity or the convincingness of the use of secondary citations.The study is not only illuminating in the understanding of plagiarism among Chinese EFL writers, but also instructive in EFL academic teaching and writing. Key words: academic writing, Chinese EFL writers, plagiarism, source use...