Faculty Resources - English:

Challenges Facing English-as-a-Second-Language Speakers

The following advice is a compilation of excerpts from The University of Hawai'i Mānoa, Writing Program. It presents a good discussion of the complexity of helping ESL students understand and avoid plagiarizing.

Many ESL students come from cultural and educational systems where concepts of scholarship and individual ownership of ideas are very different from ours. Doing "critical analysis" involves "western" behaviors: we interrogate sources, make connections among them, and assert a stance. ESL students may have learned in their country that an established source is to be treated respectfully, not questioned or criticized by a neophyte. Sometimes students may be in such awe of the language in an original text or of an argument's powerful structure that they feel incapable of paraphrasing or summarizing. Plagiarism or a student's abundant use of quotations may reflect a cultural tradition of respect for authority, not a lack of critical thinking ability. You can acknowledge your awareness of cultural differences regarding textual authority and help your students avoid plagiarism by providing explicit instruction on "doing critical analysis." Ways to encourage critical analysis and help students avoid plagiarizing:

• Discuss different cultural views on sources, texts, reference conventions, and plagiarism. Explain what is expected if students want to succeed in your course.
• Explain how and why you ask questions about texts; encourage students to see question posing as an important academic skill.
• When assigning course reading, require students to keep reading logs in which they summarize arguments, write about their thinking, make connections with other sources, describe difficulties with the reading, and ask questions.
• Explain when to quote, when to paraphrase, when to reference, and when to summarize using examples from your own writing or that of previous students. Then assign practice summarizing and paraphrasing in the context of your writing assignment. In addition, most popular handbooks give a thorough explanation of how to deal with documentation.

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