On Intellectual Property and Plagiarism

"My ideas their words, their ideas my words: which is which"

When it comes to discuss plagiarism, it is clear that intellectual property and authorship seem to be legitimate demands in the acknowledgment of knowledge construction. Yet, it is difficult to have a unanimously agreed upon definition of plagiarism. Pecorari argues that plagiarism is rooted in the social, political, and cultural configuration that gives it its interpretation and hence its definition. To avoid plagiarism, one has to faithfully acknowledge the sources of the authors from whom s/he borrowed concepts, ideas, etc. Pennycook (1996) gives a detailed and comprehensive ontogenesis of authorship and ownership of text. However, there are cultural differences as to the understanding of authorship and ownership of texts. Educational institutions’ responses to plagiarism are categorical as shown in Pecorari’s study, and in most institution worldwide. Pecorari’s concept that avoiding plagiarism can be taught as any other skill is sound and sensitive.

Pennycook redefines the concept of plagiarism in relationship to text, memory, and learning. Such a reconfiguration of plagiarism allows us, as language teachers, to gain more insights into textual borrowing and language use and creativity. I put them in order because as an EFL language teacher and teacher educator, I can relate and identify with Pennycook’s line of thought. In my teaching context, my students rely heavily on textual borrowing which they employ in their language use (mostly in writing but also in speaking), up to the moment where you can sense a certain “creativity” in their language use. Will they be able to develop ownership over the language, will they “appropriate” the language, to use Vygotsky’s concept, or not. I cannot really tell. Pennycook addresses this issue arguing that “I was warning that although memorization of texts might be a useful learning technique, it could never lead to productive, original language use (this we have been taught to believe, is one of those ‘facts’ of second language acquisition)” (Pennycook, 1996, p. 202).

However in most of the contexts where English is taught as a foreign language, education is based on memorization and language teaching is no exception. Besides, these cultures do not have similar understanding of plagiarism. They usually praise old textual authority which is public. As such then, they can make use of it. Hence when it comes to the notion of plagiarism, students from these contexts are at a disadvantage. They have no real understanding of what plagiarism is, and when they are studying in Western universities for instance, all they know about plagiarism is the punitive reaction it engenders. Students have to be prepared and taught what plagiarism is and how to acknowledge the work of others.

On the notion of "voice"

This week’s readings on voice are thought provoking. Not only had I to rethink the concept of voice, but I also had to revisit and reflect on how I voiced myself to be heard by others, hear others’ voices-especially my students by willingly encourage them to have a presence in their writing, or inadvertently hinder the emergence and development of their voice.

Yet, I should make clear what I mean by voice. Being an EFL teacher and teacher-educator, I have always been cautious when discussing the intricate issue of voice in teaching L2 writing. As I already mentioned in a previous blog entry on the CR/IC rhetoric, when addressing the L2 students’ voice we should not consider them as having no voice. These students have an already existing voice in their L1 and if they are multilingual students, they may have more than one voice.

In his reflections and refractions on voice, Atkinson acknowledges the fact that voice is a complex concept. In English L1composition studies, it has its origins in the “dominant communicative ideology that disadvantages or excludes students who are not party to it.” This statement by Atkinson shows clearly that voice taken from this ideological perspective clearly advantages students who have a specific cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu, 1977). In English L1 composition classes, non mainstream students who have a habitus that is not compatible with that required by the school will be disadvantaged. That is, voice among other things might have been already developed at home as part of the child’s linguistic socialization and not at school. In the same vein, L2 students who are required to compose in English and “display” their voice may be disadvantaged too because within the concept of voice there are cultural differences. Besides, voice has different meanings and definitions. Matsuda (2001) defines voice in Japanese in relation to the effects writing has on the readership and shows how Nanae had different voices depending on the personas she articulated. In other words, she had multiple voices as a worker, wife …

Another important aspect that is worth considering is that there are different linguistic resources to achieve voice in different languages. For instance, an L2 learner may be used to “display” voice in the L1 via a specific linguistic medium, and when shifting to English as a L2 may fail to recognize the linguistic media English use to “display” voice. One may consider the difference between the use of “I” and the effect it produces, for instance, in different languages. In this particular instance, I can recall the use of the pronoun “we” in Arabic and the effect it produces and which is more powerful than the pronoun “I”. Yet as an English L2 user, I am very much aware of the difference the use of “I” vs. “we” makes in English composition, and as such I try to achieve more effect by using “I” because I have to function in English with and within a particular mindset. Finally, the use of “I” is but one example in the discussion of how to achieve voice in second language writing. I use “I” as long as I am comfortable using it.

Reflection on Robert Kaplan's Cultural Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education (1966)

Contrastive rhetoric started with Kaplan’s seminal work on “Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education.” He focused on the problems ESL student writers had and traced them mainly to the students’ culture and L1 transfer. Of course by transfer he refers to negative transfer or interference of students’ L1 in the written production of their L2.

Kaplan focused on the rhetorical differences of ESL students’ writings in relation to the rhetorical characteristics of the English paragraph development. By studying the paragraph development for five cultural groups of ESL students, he concluded that each paragraph development reflects a particular cultural thought pattern. Surely, Kaplan initial work (1966) privileges the NES and above all considers them as homogeneous. He also categorized many ethnic groups all together in one cultural group to which he imposed a thought pattern. Theo raised the question of which Semitic language Kaplan was referring to on page 47. There isn’t one Semitic language but there may Semitic languages which are Arabic (spoken mostly in the Middle East and North Africa), Hebrew (spoken by northern Semitic people and it has many forms or varieties), Amharic (spoken in Ethiopia), Tigrinya (spoken in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea). These are all Semitic languages and I don’t think ESL writers from these varied Semitic languages are homogeneous.

Furthermore, even within NESs don’t we have students who come from different habitus and who often display so many differences in the language norms, language use, etc. So considering any homogeneity within NESs is simply a myth. We don’t even need to consider the varieties among NESs of World Englishes and that is why Kaplan’s work was criticized for being ethnocentric although he revised his work later. That is why I think that Kaplan’s original work may be thought to look at the ESL students from a deficit perspective. These ESL students cannot write the way they are expected because of their L1 and culture.

Lastly, in terms of literacy in general and academic literacy in particular we should not be looking exclusively at the students’ rhetorical structures which are the end product. For such academic literacy to develop, there are so many factors that interact such as students’ interaction with written texts, with teachers, with other students, their schemata knowledge, their voice etc. When we talk of L2 students’ voice for instance, we should not consider them as having no voice. These students have an already existing voice in their L1 and if they are multilingual students, they may have more than one voice.

How do you define "culture" in CR/IR ? (researchers' or students' perspectives)

Hi Bee,

I think that in when researchers set forth to do CR/IR, they should first of all define which perspective of culture they take. We all know that culture can be and has already been defined differently. Any researcher has to provide an operational definition of culture that is adopted in the research framework used.

Also, to answer your question whether culture will be defined from the researchers’ or students’ perspectives, I think that this depends on the focus of the researcher. What does the researcher want to do exactly? Is the research focusing on the broader notion of culture being national or ethnic? And in this case I doubt that we can reach results that are representative of national/ethnic cultures. In both case there is no room for homogeneity and I have the impression that researchers are inclined to look for and find some homogeneous trends which I doubt exist. Even if we adopt the stance of a small culture such as that of age, gender, etc… I think that it is still difficult to find trends. When doing research, we may have some expectations while research is all about expecting the unexpected by focusing on students’ cultures.

My Language Literacy Narrative

As far as languages are concerned, I was first exposed to my Mother Tongue Algerian Arabic, then to French and Classical Arabic simultaneously, and later English. I stated French before Classical Arabic because French was more spoken by my uncles, and Classical Arabic usage was restricted to certain functions such as praying and reciting the Quran. Another often forgotten language is Amazigh. This is a minority language in Algeria. My first contact with Amazigh was during vacation when we travelled. In fact, this is the language of the two neighboring cities west of my home town Jijel which are namely Bejaia and Tizi Ouzou. That tongue was amazing because it was completely different from Arabic although we had a few vocabulary items in common. Later in middle and high school I became interested in that language because there was a taboo surrounding it. As an adult I also took German classes in my M.A. program because we were required to take another foreign language apart from French. I also took some Turkish classes because I was teaching in a private Turkish Language Center and had so many Turkish friends and colleagues.

Reaching the age of five, I was admitted to school like my siblings. I recall that I learned to read and write Classical Arabic in first grade and French in fourth grade. English entered my literacy scene in eighth grade. As soon as I learned to read, I came to demystify the written word because I could appropriate it. I started to read anything that I could put my hands on. We were lucky enough to have a panoply of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries in Arabic, French, and English as well as books in Arabic and French and even a book for learning Spanish. I used to spend my spare time reading through the dictionaries. What was amazing is that no one taught me how to use a dictionary. I say this particularly for the Arabic dictionary because to make good use of it, you should know the root of the word you are looking for and often the way words are inflected make it difficult to discover the root especially for a novice user of that language. I guess I must have learned this by attuning to my father using the Arabic dictionary.

Later when I was introduced to French at school, I had no learning difficulty because of my parents being both fluent in French. The French sound was familiar to me while the French letters were just amazing. As soon as I learned to read, I used to spend all my afternoons while my mother was asleep on the second floor of the house. In one of the rooms, my father kept some sort of a “library”. In fact it was a book case that was closed with a key. I used to go upstairs, unlock the book case, and start navigating through all the classics of the French literature ranging from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, L’education sentimentale (Sentimental education); Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (The flowers of evil), Ernest Hemingway’s Le vieil homme et la mer (The old man and the sea), to Honore de Balzac’s La comedie humaine (The human comedy), etc. I did not necessarily read, but being in contact with those books that were old and kept there was appealing. As I grew up, I kept going there and reading. My understanding of course was different but at least I had a secret and that was because I could read.

This is as far as reading in French out of school is concerned. For writing, I always thought that the written word is majestic. When I recall learning to write, I remember that my handwriting was not that good. It has always been legible but was never calligraphic like my brother’s; who I guess inherited it from my mother’s. This was the psycho-motor act of writing which had nothing to do with composing. As far back as I can remember, we did not use to compose a lot in elementary school. We rarely ever wrote very short paragraph. My mother used to help a lot. We both had to prepare lessons in advance so that when I went to class I could read the text fluently. In addition to reading fluently, I also had to understand any new word or grammatical structure. My mother used the Bescherelle book of French grammar. For pronunciation of course I had no difficulty.
However, composing was not focused in the classroom. This might explain why in middle school, writing essays with an introduction, body and conclusion was not that easy, but it was still not impossible. What helped in composing was reading, the more articles and stories I read, the more I could write. Of course, the more I advanced the easier it became so that for my exam preparation I always set a schedule without including Arabic, French, and English. In fact, I should confess that I never prepared for a language exam. Things changed t the university because I decided to major in English.

When I learned German, I remember that my teacher was obsessed by what she called “the correct pronunciation”. This was very frustrating because it simply inhibited all of the class. We tried to draw her attention to this fact but in vain. However, for my Turkish classes I often drove my teacher crazy because I used to compare the language system of Turkish with that of Arabic, French and even English. What helped is that many words were originally Arabic although sometimes the meaning was different.

Questions on Matsuda's article

1) Matsuda traces the history and discursive construction of process and post-process in composition studies and L2 writing. Given that discursive construction is the construction of some key terms and concepts that shaped the development of composition studies and L2 writing, what trends do you notice in the discourse of current composition studies and L2 writing research?

2) Pedagogical reforms in composition instruction started before process movement but were not as successful as process movement in the 70’s. There were isolated and successful ephemera reforms that did not last (p. 68-69). However, although process has been adopted, teaching practices were still rooted in traditional pedagogy.

As former students of English or composition/writing teachers did you notice shifts in

teaching writing pedagogy in your respective ESL/EFL contexts?

3) Matsuda argues that knowledge is discursively constructed. Such construction is to be found in the dominant research for instance. Within L2 writing research, the techniques that were used and reported on in L2 research studies in the 60’s and 70’s (pre-writing and rapid writing – p.76) were similar to process and free-writing in the process era in composition studies. This may argue for the existence of a process era in L2 writing although it was not endorsed by all L2 writing teachers and that arguing for a post-process era in L2 writing is somehow controversial. Do you argue for the existence of a process era in L2 writing and advocate for post-process and why?

More questions on Atkinson's article

2)Atkinson states that many researches showed that there is “[a] mismatch between L1-oriented process pedagogy and the life experiences of various kinds of students”. The examples he gave reported on “non-mainstream writers” in US contexts but also mainly on other contexts where such pedagogy has been “imported”. What does such a realization mean to you as a composition or second language teacher?



3)In the version of process pedagogy to writing that Atkinson used, he “played a substantial, interventionist role in students’ writing processes, offering comments and encouragement designed to mold students’ writing in definite ways” (Atkinson, 2003, p. 10). He also gave little choice of topics to his students, and “rarely encouraged self-discovery as the primary purpose of writing assignments; quite to the contrary, these assignments typically asked students to write ‘about something’-some social issues or concern beyond their purely personal, individual lives” (Atkinson, 2003, p. 10).
As L2 writing teachers, whether in an L1 context or L2 context, do you identify with Atkinson’s practice? In your opinion, what is the rationale behind such teaching practices?



4)Although Atkinson advocates for a post-process pedagogy, he acknowledges the usefulness of process writing with its stages of pre-writing, drafting, feedback, and revising. He thus argues not for a paradigm shift but for a paradigm expansion. To what extent do you agree with this view and why?



5)Writing has the lion’s share the realm of literacy and is thus a matter of power and culture. Power in terms of who has access to such literacy and culture in terms of whose norms are implemented, used and promoted. On page 6, Atkinson poses this question: “[w]hat do notions like ‘voice’, ‘critical thinking’, ‘originality’, ‘clarity’, and ‘plagiarism’ mean outside the cultural contexts in which they have been developed and are so deeply embedded?” . In your teaching practices, and especially those of us who teach in the Outer and Expanding Circles, how do you deal with such notions in practice and how do you operationalize them?

Discussion questions on Dwight Atkinson's and Paul Kei Matsuda's articles

Dear All,

Here are the discussion questions on “L2 writing in the post-process era: Introduction” by Dwight Atkinson and “Process and post-process: A discursive history” by Paul Kei Matsuda. I am posting one question per entry. Feel free to respond to anyone. We will discuss them thoroughly in class.

1) Atkinson suggests according to Trimbur that the “social turn” in L1 composition studies and in other fields was a reaction to structuralism that was asocial in nature and hence reductive. The “social turn” translated into practice in L1 composition classrooms and then later in L2 composition. However, Trimbur’s critique of the “social turn” theorists is that process writing has limits and is inherently contradictory:

- Conceiving of the teacher as a facilitator and collaborator whose task is to empower students express themselves was problematic. “Cunning” students could handle easily what teachers were looking for in terms of “sincerity and authenticity of voice”. In what ways can this be dis/advantageous to students?

- The process / product dichotomy is somehow contradictory in the sense that “[students’] composition processes would eventually result in a product for evaluation”. To what extent do you agree with this claim?

- Defining writing as a process highlights its cognitive, individualistic, and hence asocial character. What criticism can you direct to such position? Within process writing, don’t we still use peer-reviewing, scaffolding, collaborative work, etc.?