ESL Student Plagiarism Prevention Challengesand Institutional Interventions

Breakout Room E

Research has found unintentional plagiarism to be the most common type of university plagiarism, yet what underlies it is not adequately understood. Thus, our study examines ESL student perspectives on academic integrity challenges, especially unintentional plagiarism and university interventions. The study employed semi-structured individual qualitative interviews with 20 ESL students who had just completed an advanced EAP writing course at a Canadian university in the Winter semester of 2021. The course discussed plagiarism and the APA 7th edition extensively. One interview per participant was conducted online and the data were analyzed qualitatively. Research findings indicate that the predominant cause of the participants' challenges was their lack of experience using citations before entering the university. The participants had written no formal essays or only opinion-based essays without source requirement. Therefore, the participants found the APA 7th edition hard to observe initially. They all found paraphrasing a challenge. A less serious one was to create a reference list of various types of sources in APA 7. Regarding assistance, the participants felt that the style templates and models were valuable, but, that even more, so were the interactive workshops at the semester’s start. Thus, a combination of resources, workshops, and teacher-facilitated practices, along with improved writing are expected to empower ESL students (Khoo, 2021).