Thursday, June 4, 2009

My Ethnographic Research Topic

For this project I would like to examine the extent to which the cultural background of ESL students influence their source attribution in academic writing. Particularly, I will be exploring the the cultural variations in understanding plagiarism and documentation.

Plagiarism is a problem I usually encounter in my teaching, so I would like to research this topic as it applies to nonnative speakers of English.

5 comments:

K. McClure said...

This is such an interesting and important topic in a classroom that includes students with so many global identities. There was an issue of... something... (I'll look it up and email you) last year, around July 2008, that addressed this topic. It could be some good background reading. I am also curious about how exactly you can incorporate observations into a study on this topic - observing student conferences in a writing center/tutoring setting; observing writing workshops; etc... I look forward to learning about your discoveries!

K. McClure said...

here is that article:


Plagiarism and second language writing in an electronic age

J Flowerdew, Y Li - Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 2008 - Cambridge Univ Press

Rachel Goertel: said...

I haven't had a semester yet that a student hasn't handed in a paper with text copied right from the internet. It is so accessible, so tempting and so fast. There is a real need for more insight on this topic.

Lisya Seloni said...

Hi Basak,

I agree with K and Rachel. This is a very urgent and important area of investigation in many fields, especially in the field of education and TESOL (as the definition and practices become rather blurred with the diverse student/teacher population). We ven have recently had some unfortunate incidents at IUP, which speak volumes about the imporance of this topic from K-16.

The issue of plagiarism also becomes very intriguing in the context of information age as the very definition of "text" is being challanged.

In L2 field (although I woud recommed you to also look at L1 literacy studies and composition), Read A. Pennycook's oft-cited 1996 article (in TQ) entitled " Borrowing others' words: Texts, ownership, memory and plagiarism. Also, see Joel Bloch's articles on plagiarism and internet use.

Really interesting stuff!

Barnawi said...

This is an interesting and a very hot topic nowdays in the field of TESOL I guesss. Thus, I strongly recommend you to read the following articles
"Weaving strands of writer identity: Self as author and the NNES “plagiarist” by Mark A. Ouellette, 2008 journal of second language writing and Discourse appropriation, construction of identities, and "the complex issue of plagiarism: ESL students writing in graduate school" by Ali Abasi, 2006 the journal of second language writing.