Poster by: Ling Shi, Cindy Leibel, Ellie Chen
Session: B | Time: 9:45AM – 10:00AM | Location: Room 208
This poster presentation concerns appropriate citation practices in student writing. UBC’s policy on Academic Honesty and Standards requires students to acknowledge when using other people’s words and ideas. Students’ writing should be original, inter-textual, and conform to strict rules prohibiting plagiarism. Although citation errors can be corrected and copying the whole paragraph/essay can be easily identified as plagiarism, using words or sentences and mixing them with one’s own opens up a gray area between legitimate and illegitimate textual borrowing. Good citation practice is not just about providing the names and dates of references; it includes making sense of previous texts and applying understandings of the distinction in a specific disciplinary context between special versus common knowledge and between words owned by others versus those shared. Many existing web resources on plagiarism simply list citation rules rather than help students understand how to make citation decisions using examples from authentic student work. There is genuine confusion among students, especially for those who speak English as a second language and come from cultures that encourage sharing and appropriation in text construction.
To address students’ confusion, this project is designed to engage students in exploring how to incorporate and cite source texts in their writing by building a web forum of citation practices based on examples of student writing. Based on data collected from a previous SSHRC project, about 80 excerpts from student writing are archived along with students’ or professors’ suggestions on how to acknowledge the sources in each case. Since the web forum (https://blogs.ubc.ca/citationpractices/) was constructed, students have been invited to either post their views on the archived excerpts or add their own writing episodes for discussion. Those who have used the web forum find it informative to see questions raised by peers and comments from faculty members on their or their peers’ citation practices. They learnt how to cite in similar contexts for their own writing.
Abstract: 568