Yamada-Plagiarism

What prevents ESL/EFL writers from avoiding plagiarism?: Analyses of 10 North-American college websites -Kyoko Yamada

The title of Kyoko Yamada’s journal, “what prevents ESL/EFL writers from avoiding plagiarism?,” is quite intriguing to me since as a potential writer for MA degree thesis which is supposed to start at the end of this year, I have been worried about this matter seriously. Before I started this MA course, I didn’t know or think much about plagiarism. I had never thought that it was a crime. I thought that it was a kind of borrowing something rather than cheating or stealing.
But now things have changed since Dr. Mark Love pointed out that there were some problems with my papers for the previous course, Issues in TESOL, last year concerning plagiarism. He stated that he could find some plagiarism and difficulties in my papers which did not follow the rules of APA style for writing and that he could not accept my papers. I sincerely recognized and apologized for the mistakes I had made in the papers. Only after that could I barely pass the course under the consideration of all the efforts I had made for the course including dedicated participation in the activities of the course.
Yet still I find myself in trouble of being trapped in the doldrums where I cannot easily get out because I am still not quite familiar with APA style and I am already under the stress that I should be able to write my thesis properly enough to be accepted by the professors. In that sense, this writing course can be something I should have been looking forward to.
When it comes to Kyoko Yamada’s journal, I find it informative and useful in the sense that it reminds me that universities and colleges in North America make a lot of efforts to prevent plagiarism from occurring and even to provide students with alternative steps such as how to use paraphrases appropriately using one’s own words and where to put quotation marks. Even though there are some skeptical opinions of the effectiveness of paraphrases for ESL/EFL writers, I still think the efforts they make deserve complimenting.





Thinking about the Korean EFL environment at universities and colleges, actually I do not know much about it. The tendency or situation related to plagiarism must have been changed because it has been far more than twenty years since I graduated from the university in 1988. But in so far as I know about the TESOL Mall at WOOSONG University, plagiarism is strictly forbidden. And I believe that it is natural that the policy is applied to other academic fields in Korea as well. I hope that not much plagiarism is going around.
Back in those days, probably because of lack of understanding what plagiarism is and why it is infelicitous or maybe because of cultural differences, quite a lot of plagiarism was going on without much consciousness of intellectual property rights what so ever. As Kyoko Yamada’s statement, professors and researchers were reluctant to make the matter a real issue. It was such good times that what was supposed to be guilty was not guilty at all.
In a nutshell, colleges throughout the world including those in Korea should try harder to prevent plagiarism by informing students of what it is and why it is not allowed. As for academic writers, we have the obligation to inform students of plagiarism and not to plagiarize others’ writings without their consents as we can see from Kyoko Yamada’s statement: “Clearly, writing instructors, researchers, and textbook writers need to provide more accessible and unambiguous information on paraphrases.”(p.251)