Celia Thompson

Beyond Plagiarism: Transgressive and Nontransgressive Intertextuality

The debate about what constitutes plagiarism and how it should be dealt with in the academy continues to gain momentum. The response from many higher education institutions is to channel ever-increasing amounts of resources into plagiarism detection technologies, rather than trying to ascertain why plagiarism might be occurring in the first place. In this article, drawing on a wide range of data from student assignments and interviews with staff and students, we argue that it would be preferable to do away with the notion of plagiarism in favour of an understanding of transgressive and nontransgressive intertextuality. Once textual borrowings are seen in this light, we are more able to focus on the crucial issues of writing, identity, power, knowledge, disciplinary dynamics, and discourse that underlie intertextuality. We conclude that judgements about the nature of intertextuality are contextually contingent; they should also be understood as part of a broader account of institutional regulation and student resistance, interdisciplinarity, and the mediation of discourse.

Students’ Accounts of Their First-Year Undergraduate Academic Writing Experience: Implications for the Use of the CEFR

ABSTRACT This article addresses the suitability of the CEFR as the basis for decisions about the readiness of individuals to engage in academic writing tasks in undergraduate university courses, and as a guide to progress. The CEFR offers potentially relevant general scales and subscales, but also more specific subscales for writing in the academic context. However, recent challenges to traditional views of academic writing have potential implications for assessment frameworks such as the CEFR when they are used to identify readiness for, and progress in, academic study. In this article we explore the views of students on what it means to “do” academic writing. Questionnaires, interviews, and short reflective texts were used to investigate the changing perceptions of first-year undergraduate students at an Australian university. The analysis of student data confirms the reality of the more complex view of academic writing suggested by the recent literature. The article then considers what implications this has for the adequacy of the definitions provided in the CEFR. It suggests that the CEFR descriptors underrepresent the complexity of the challenges of academic writing, particularly its cognitive demands. A new and rather different approach will be required to inform assessments used to manage the admission of students in`to academic writing contexts and the monitoring of their progress.

A Context-Based Approach to the Identification of Hedging Devices and Features of Writer-Reader Relationship in Academic Publications

Studies into stance-taking in scholarly publications remain inconclusive. Using software programs that employ predetermined lists of items to analyze data from large corpora fails to account for the role played by context in stance-taking and limits the possibility of discovering new items. Academic writers’ experience and knowledge, as well as their attitudes towards their subject matter and readers have also tended to be ignored. This paper reports on the development and application of two instruments for identifying hedging devices and features of writer-reader relationship that adopt a broader, context-based approach to the analysis of these aspects of stance. We suggest that these tools enrich our understanding of stance-taking, thus making an innovative and valuable contribution to the field of academic discourse analysis.