Reframing student plagiarism: Insight, fairness, and instructional opportunities

Abstract

This paper starts from an exploration of two well-established viewpoints on unintended plagiarism by
adult or young adult non-native-speaking (NNS) students. The first is the developmental perspective,
with its focus on patchwriting as a transitional strategy for writers unfamiliar with the university
setting (stemming from Howard, 1993). The second is the cultural perspective, focusing on the
cultural underpinnings of perceptions about acceptable or unacceptable use of academic sources (as
advanced by Pennycook, 1994, 1996). Both viewpoints are seen to display informative consistencies
with postmodern thinking about the intricate interconnections that can be expected to operate
among texts. An added layer of complexity is then suggested through consideration of revealing
parallels between paraphrasing and two other, demonstrably very difficult skills—translation and
simplification—which exemplify the demanding subtlety of language processes that require mastery
not only of usage but also of use (as defined by Widdowson, 1978). To address the inherent difficulty
of paraphrasing, which is associated with both its developmental and cultural dimensions, a
correspondingly flexible and ambitious pedagogical framework—Universal Design for Instruction
(UDI)—is proposed. The paper concludes with illustrations of how three UDI principles can be applied
to paraphrasing pedagogy for NNS students.