Podcast 412, Academic Integrity: Plagiarism, Predatory Publishing and Contract Cheating (6-3-21)

On this week's podcast I address the topic of academic integrity, a concern at all levels of the education system. My guest is Professor Diane Pecorari from the City University of Hong Kong, who is an expert in this area. Among the topics we discuss on the episode are the following:

• Intertextuality – borrowing from earlier texts
• Plagiarism involves deception
• Plagiarism inside and outside education settings
• Accidental “plagiarism” and the need to differentiate it from deliberate deception
• Advocating a pedagogical response to plagiarism (punishing versus coaching and supporting)
• How widespread plagiarism is in higher education settings
• Causes of plagiarism
• Students may feel inadequate to a task facing them because of the expansion of access to university education and increasingly educating students through a language that is not their own leading to plagiarism
• Preventing plagiarism – rules, detection mechanisms, penalties; admitting students with proficiency in the language of instruction and with sufficient academic preparation for studying the subject they’re going to study; giving students the skills they need to use quotations and to develop their voices as writers.
• Text-matching software such as Turnitin and Urkund. Risk of false positives and false negatives.
• Deterring plagiarism through penalties
• Patch writing (coined by Rebecca Howard) as a particular kind of plagiarism
• Essay mills and contract cheating – challenges to detect. Risk of students being blackmailed or ripped off.
• Predatory publishing and predatory conferences: no quality control mechanisms and whose sole purpose is to make a profit.
• Avoid them by looking for journals in which authors you respect publish, look at who is on the editorial board, consider the proportionality of any fee that is requested and consider the time taken to have an article published.
• Use this website to identify reputable journals.
• How her interest in this area was sparked
• English for Academic Purposes versus English as an additional language
• Content of an English for Academic Purposes course
• Hot topics in research on English for Academic Purposes
• What schools are for
• Academic Tribes and Territories by Tony Becher and Paul R. Trowler.
• Methodical, patient clear teachers are what we all need.