Writing and Writing Instruction in Different Academic Contexts
PLAGIARISM AS PRACTICE IN A GRADUATE ACADEMIC WRITING COURSE
Laura (Jeannette) Taylor
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States
European universities are increasingly implementing Englishmedium programs (Dearden, 2014); however, with this internationalization come new issues of language proficiency. Graduatelevel programs in particular demand advanced academic writing (AW) skills, including a sophisticated lexicon (Berman and Cheng, 2001), disciplinespecific knowledge and the ability to perform extended writing tasks (Cooper and Bikowski, 2007). With a myriad of necessary skills, preparing these students can be daunting. Expertise in a skill, such as writing, is often achieved through deliberate practice, effortful and repetitive practice over time (Kellogg et al., 2013). Practice for nonnative writers may consist of multiple drafts accompanied by teacher feedback; however, this becomes timeconsuming if tasks are given frequently. Hence, the problem of this investigation: How can I provide students 1) daily writing practice that 2) models accurate, academic language 3) without requiring daily feedback and revision? The proposed solution was copywork, (i.e., daily copying of expert writing for an extended period.) Though seemingly similar to plagiarism, this technique successfully addressed the three aspects of the problem. Premaster’s students performed copywork almost daily for seven weeks, during which time very little explicit grammar instruction was provided. The aim was to improve students’ written accuracy, which was measured by comparing diagnostic and midterm writing samples. Preliminary results indicate that, while many students improved, this improvement may not be significant enough to support further use of the technique. However, future research should build upon and extend this investigation, for example by pairing copywork texts with learner objectives (e.g., grammar features, genres).
References
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