Week-5 Comments on “Borrowing others’ words: Text, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism”

The word “plagiarism” is the most serious word my teacher told me before I came here. What my teacher’s notion is that I should be very careful about “borrow” others words, sentences or ideas when I do the written work in the USA. Since my teacher finished his PH.D abroad, he knew about the directors or the professors are particular about “borrowing words” in USA. While he told me about this, I was doing my thesis which was really hard for me and for most of the Chinese college students. When the teachers were talking about the thesis, I think they were missing the most important part about distinguishing the writing of your own by citing others ideas or words and avoiding plagiarism. We do know don’t copy from others and create by ourselves. But how to cite or borrow properly has been totally ignored. This is a very important part of construct a passage, I think, especially for undergraduate students who are novices of writing academic papers. What’s more? For most of the undergraduate students they don’t own much about the academic theories or research results on their own, so how can they fulfill the whole passage just by the descriptions of the topic? Just like what Franklin said “why should I give my Readers bad lines of m own when good ones of other People’s are so plenty?” (P208).

When we do thesis, it is necessary to find articles or ideas to support our views. But for Chinese students they have two big problems, I think. The first one is, for most of the students in China, learning English is a kind of memorizing words and recited articles. This happens in many L2 learning environment and cause an impact on weakening the ability of creation as L2 learner. This starts from the initial learning period and continues until they are involved in the problem of creating their own work. You can imagine the difficulties and struggle from the students. Actually I understand we need some imitation or copy from others at the very beginning of learning. But the problem goes worse when the students keep on imitate and borrow from others at the time they need to be done by themselves and product their individual ideas or theories. It seems like that some of them are losing the kind of ability or in other word, the creativity and curiosity has been killed with such learning environments. It really sad to talk about it, since to some extent; I am one of them and need the improvement of finding our own way. But it is getting better, more and more fundamental schools are beginning to change their methodology and concept to avoid such problem. And we can get the information from the passage the”such views, with Chinese learners cast as passive, imitative memorizers, to be enlightened by the advent of the creative West, echo down to the present”. (P220) Since the individual views emerged in the recent years, it is easy to see alternative learning practices and relationships to text as little more than backward, outmoded learning strategies. (P220)

And then here comes out the second problem about standardizing the citing system and clarifying boundary between the “legally borrowing” and “illegally Plagiarism”. “A number of quite challenging issues were raised by several students, showing that many of them, while sometimes unsure about the rules of textual borrowing, were nevertheless aware of issues to do with texts and leaning.”(P22) If the clear rules have been positioned, students can, to some extent, avoid involving in the plagiarism situation.