RECOGNIZING PLAGIARISM AND ANTI-PLAGIARISM: RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF A LEARNING TUTORIAL SYSTEM FOR PARAPHRASING AND CITATION OF ENGLISH

Along with the need and popularity of higher education degrees in Taiwan, a great number of English essays, articles, theses and dissertations have been developed every year. In addition, many of the most important research results have been written and published in English. However, it is not an easy task for Taiwanese students—English as a foreign language (EFL) learners—to compose a variety of writings in English. Some students plagiarized or illegally used someone else’s academic works or ideas in order to pass an examination or receive an academic degree. As a result, different kinds of plagiarism have been increasing over time.

In terms of academic ethics, plagiarism may result from disrespect to the original author of an academic work, and this misbehavior may prevent human beings from further developing professional knowledge. At this moment, however, the major function of the currently available plagiarism-detecting software plays the role of checking possibly plagiarized papers with the essay database or Internet-based search engines. The researchers of this project identified that the currently available plagiarism-detecting software or program could not guide students of English to correctly paraphrase, cite or quote a source or academic work to avoid plagiarism.

In order to systematically guide Chinese language users to paraphrase, cite or quote English works and sources, the researchers of this project aimed to develop a learning tutorial system with a Chinese interface for language learners of English—DWright—which would guide users to recognize plagiarism, antiplagiarism, as well as how to correctly paraphrase, cite or quote sources and academic works of English.

The developers of this DWright followed the ASSURE Model and used some of the techniques of text mining and retrieval in information processing to develop the learning tutorial system with four parts, namely, recognizing plagiarism, paraphrasing and citing sentences of English, taking tests of antiplagiarism of English writing, and developing a personal learning portfolio. DWright intends to guide users of it to learn how to paraphrase, cite or quote a source or academic work, and thus to avoid plagiarism in all ways. It is expected that DWright will enable users of this learning tutorial system with a Chinese interface to write English sentences with confidence.