Reflective Writing 9_ Plagiarizing Problem of EFL Students’ Academic English Writing

 

Reflective Writing 9_ Plagiarizing Problem of EFL Students’ Academic English Writing

Source: pohontomat.com

The English journal by Virginia LoCastro and Mayumi Masuko is talking about plagiarism and academic writing of learners of English. Plagiarism is when you present someone else's work or ideas as your own, with or without their permission, by incorporating it into your work without giving full confession. The aim are to know the problem of plagiarism by learners of English and to improve a large number of EFL learners academic writing skills to achieve their professional goals. They decided to conduct an ethnographic research in Japan by doing written assignments of learners at classroom, examining plagiarism the work of others, as well as, examining the broader social content to get the evidences.

There are some reasons why learners did plagiarism in English as a second language usually in their essays and research papers. Firstly, learners plagiarize as a result of being educated in junior and senior high schools that they can or should simply copy from an authority, according to one educational viewpoint. But it does not appear to be the only workable interpretation in Japan, at least not among current students. Since WWII, the Japanese education system has not actively promoted that viewpoint. Another reasons are because the desire to cut corners. Most of them giving reasons as lack of time, they does not know how to do the assignment, and they fear of getting poor grade due to their English proficiency level. That’s why they had copied from the original source and it is becoming their behaviour as well. Then several differences in cultural practices, in attitudes and in training, and also the lack of skill or language proficiency of learners. Perhaps the problem of learners to do plagiarism because they get stressed, they are thinking only a little thing that they can create or write. So they regard to writing paraphrase, summaries, copy down the directly quotation or passage and even dropping all the definite articles to their English essay writing.

In conclusion, probably writing an English essay is difficult without plagiarism in the beginning, because sometime it is useful for us as student to get ideas to write. However, the role of teacher is very essential. As a teacher of English they have to be able to handle the situation or detect whether the students do plagiarized or not. It is to help learners to have better academic writing in English without plagiarism.