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PLAGIARISM AND SECOND LANGUAGE WRITING IN AN ELECTRONIC AGE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

John Flowerdew  and
Yongyan Li
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Abstract

It has been observed that plagiarism is a problem across specialities and professions, and it is probably becoming more rampant than ever in this electronic age. Based on a body of literature primarily in applied linguistics, this review focuses on textual plagiarism and antiplagiarism in second language academic writing. Following a conceptualization of plagiarism and an examination of some terminology employed in the literature to address the complexity of the issue, a number of perspectives taken upon plagiarism in the literature are examined. These include a cultural interpretation, a developmental perspective, a disciplinary perspective, student beliefs and practices, faculty perceptions, and a focus upon antiplagiarism pedagogy. The challenge and opportunity involved in dealing with plagiarism is then highlighted by reviewing work that has analyzed the problem in connection with the Internet, by exemplifying some antiplagiarism detection devices, and by relating these to John Sinclair's “idiom principle” of linguistic structure. The article ends by suggesting a few lines of future research on plagiarism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics , Volume 27 , March 2007 , pp. 161 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

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