Plagiarism

The reason why this topic keeps cropping up in my posts is because students keep plagiarising! In my view this is one of the hardest things for students from other cultures to understand and to avoid doing. I think, unfortunately, that many overseas students do not get enough help and this is one reason why it happens. Plagiarism is not something that you can be warned against once, and then forgotten about. You have to learn about it as a topic. Even lecturers and tutors argue amongst themselves sometimes about what is acceptable and unacceptable from students. Sometimes students deliberately plagiarise knowing what they are doing, sometimes they plagiarise accidentally because they don’t know what is acceptable in western academic culture. Unfortunately, in either case, the penalities at university are likely to be very severe, with the very least punishment being scoring a ‘zero’ in that piece of work without an option to resubmit it.

The first step in avoiding plagiarism is beginning to understand what it is, what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. You will not gain a thorough understanding of it immediately. You should be prepared to read about it, think about it, read about it in some other sources, think about it again and so on until you build up an appreciation of the issues involved. The link that I am showing you here is from Essex University and has some really useful comments to make regarding plagiarism.

The other link that I have here is a newspaper article about overseas students buying essays for university. The point that I am trying to make by showing you this article is that you will not be fooling anyone if you hand in work which is not yours, because your tutors or lecturers will know it’s not yours! It is upsetting to see students getting into trouble in this way. I assure you that I know when a student has not written a piece of work and it leads to all sort of problems. Write your work as well as you can in English, and then take it to someone in the English Language Centre who should sit down with you and help you improve it. Remember – this is a hot issue and if you read this article you will realise that everybody is talking about it all the time so if you try it, you probably won’t get away with it! Here’s the article from the BBC.

Academic Listening

One of the biggest problems that overseas students face at university is in lectures. Why do the lecturers speak so quickly?! Why do they jump about all over the place, why don’t they carefully follow the points on the slide? Well, lecturers are humans (I think!) and they get distracted, they suddenly think about things to say, and most of their students are native speakers! It’s fair to say that most lecturers aren’t thinking about the overseas students in their lecture room when they are talking – that means they are thinking just about the content of their lectures and not about their language, or how they are talking.

What can you do to make things easier? You can give yourself more listening practice. You need to practise listening to real university lecturers giving real lectures. Today I am going to show you a site at Newcastle University where you can do that. This site has lots of videos of lecturers talking on a range of different topics. When you follow the link you can see the topic and the lecturer and the course that the lecture comes from. Click on the catalogue number on the left to get to the topic and the video clips. The only thing we can’t do is access the classroom materials. However, we can access the tapescript for the lectures and that means we can listen, and when we can’t understand, we can read and listen to what the lecturer says. The Newcastle Academic Listening Exercises are here.

Essay marking criteria

I said a few things in my last post about essay marking criteria. Each institution uses different marking criteria, but generally speaking it is quite unusual to get much more than 70% for a piece of work at a British university. This often worries students as they may be used to getting much higher marks. If you get 70% or higher then you really are doing very well indeed, the most common mark will be 50 – 60%. For all of you essay writers out there in this post I am directing you to an example set of essay marking criteria which comes from the University of Westminster. If you haven’t seen criteria like this before then it should be very useful for you to see what your lecturers are looking for. What you need to do is read the criteria carefully and then interpret what these features really mean in your piece of work. For example one of the criteria is:
‘Good use of direct quotations which generally follow conventions.’
This means that simply following the rules about how to use direct quotations will earn you marks (not sure? Look up my post on ‘referencing’). Read Westminster University’s essay marking criteria here.

Linking devices

What devices? Linking devices! These are things that your teachers go on and on about all the time! These are the expressions like furthermore, however, on top of that and all those other words that your teacher gets you to underline in class all the time. Why is your teacher obsessed about these things? Because they really add to the fluency of your writing. They turn separate sentences you write into a whole text and if you use them correctly your marks will improve. When teachers mark your essays they have a whole set of criteria that they are checking your writing against – and using these linking devices correctly is way up on this list so you need a good grasp of how to use them.

I’m going to suggest two links for you to look at in this post. Firstly, there’s a nice overview and extensive list of linking words here put together by Viv Quarry. Secondly, take a look at the Headway site which has a couple of exercises on linking devices.

Last but not least, there’s a brand new forum on the new overseas students message board called extensive writing. Remember the message board is for you to build confidence in using English so you feel more comfortable using it in front of native speaker students. See you there.