Writing and Writing Instruction in Different Academic Contexts
PLAGIARISM IN 70 TYPES OF INTERTEXTUAL ERROR PATTERNS
Tony Franzky¹, Sabina Krämer², Kerstin Eleonora Kohl³
¹University of Education, Freiburg, Germany ²University of Education, Freiburg, Germany ³University of Education, Freiburg, Germany
Academic discussion of plagiarism focuses on scientific writing and publication strategies, with an emphasis on topics such as detection, prevention, and dealing with plagiarism, and the establishment of evidencebased academic writing courses for students. Many studies of the problems students face in correctly referencing texts rely heavily on statements made by the students themselves, which may not be sufficient for the development of a successful concept for writing instruction. Our study focuses on studentwritten texts, which allows us to draw conclusions about (a)typical writing acts based on a typology of mistakes. This enriches academic discussion of scientific plagiarism, because so far it seems to be impossible to develop concrete criteria for determining the intertextual quality of a text. If individual instances of plagiarism are considered as a subset of all possible errors in the authors referencing system, then it is possible to use text corpus analysis to generate categories, which simplify the rating of the whole text, as well as determining the severity of individual errors or groups of errors. By means of a linguistic corpus analysis of texts from students studying a range of subjects and in various stages of their studies, we were able to identify five categories of referencing errors. We were able to further divide these into around 70 error patterns. This clustering and subsumptioning provides a sound typology of mistakes, which should be informative for developing effective didactic concepts for writing instruction. Assuming that prevention of plagiarism is best handled during the process of studying and writing as part of a didactic concept, our results offer a broad overview of both studyphase and subjectspecific types of referencing errors which are useful for the teaching of scientific writing and academic integrity should provide a broad overview of both studyphase and subjectspecific types of referencing errors.