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).
While it is important to call for a broader understanding of non-Western notions of plagiarism among Western academics, it is equally crucial for non-Western countries to promote an understanding of plagiarism widely to students in the process of teaching, since claiming innocence based on ignorance is not excusable all the time. Therefore, the stakeholders in China, i.e., policy makers in education, academics, teachers, researchers, and students need to collaborate and cooperate in promoting the teaching of the nature of plagiarism, including what actions are considered plagiarism, how to avoid plagiarism, skills of paraphrasing, and ways of citing and referencing. Considering the fact that most universities in the English-speaking academic discourse community in US, UK, and Australia “were very informative on the subject of what writing practices might be termed plagiarism” (Pecorari, 2001, p. 238), China should speed up on instruction about plagiarism, not only in universities, but also in high schools, since more Chinese students are going abroad for higher education. They need to be well prepared for the serious issue of plagiarism in order to adapt to the new academic community more easily and successfully. Not only should instruction about plagiarism be part of the curriculum, but also more research is needed—since the findings showed that American high school education makes a difference, it is worth investigating how plagiarism is addressed in American high schools, so that those experiences can also be adopted in Chinese high schools and university teaching.
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(Copyedited by Duncan SIDWELL and DING Yanren)
About the Author
ZHANG Cong is a PhD student in the Second Language Studies/ESL Program(Department of English) at Purdue University. Her research interests include second language writing, English teaching and research, intercultural communication, and World Englishes. Email: [email protected]
[1] Part of the results of this study was presented at the 12th Symposium on Second Language Writing, October 2013. I would like to thank Professor Tony Silva and my colleague Scott R. Partridge for their valuable feedback on the earlier drafts of this manuscript. I am especially grateful for the helpful suggestions and insightful comments offered by the anonymous Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics reviewers.