PLAGIARISM

Some Techniques Used by English Teachers To Detect Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a controversial topic among many experts, authors, and language teachers. This is because, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether a write-up is partially or completely plagiarized. There are cases of coincidence where two or more texts can look alike in presentation and use of similar words. In such a situation it may be difficult to tell who the original author of the piece really is. But, that notwithstanding, plagiarism is rather becoming habit for some people. Some writers just find it difficult to construct a sentence without browsing the internet to see if they could copy. They feel copying from the net will help save time and the stress of thinking through on what they can write by themselves.

This has become a regular occurrence particularly for most bloggers and content marketers. The quest to flood their blogs or websites with content to attract readers has compelled many to copy from other websites and paste on theirs. Sadly enough, most teachers are struggling with the same issue of plagiarism which has now become a common tendency for most students. Some just want to save time, and by so doing, they will rather copy a chunk of material from the web within few minutes instead of taking time to construct an original piece. This has added a truck-load of work to language teachers trying to figure out ways to detect plagiarism.



Most language teachers are already familiar with the writing skills of their students. Apart from this, by interacting with students the teacher can assess them individually and know their writing skills. Just a father with kids at home, the more time you spend time with your kids, the more you get to know about their specific skills like writing and language expressions. As a teacher, if your students are between the ages of 13 and 15, you can have an idea on their level of language expression. By applying “spot diagnosis” you can do a quick comparison between the student and the quality of work provided. If a kid of less than 10 presents a write-up that sounds like a university graduate, then it is obvious the material is certainly copied.

As a teacher, you can start by comparing the material written with student’s ability. This may consists of his age, and other factors like class, and level of expression. Generally those of higher academic rating like high schools, graduate, and post graduate will definitely provide quality and better content than those of lower classes. But, when it comes to plagiarism, class is not really a factor because even those of higher classes can also plagiarize. This implies another approach will be needed apart from comparing the student’s ability to his write-up.

Scanning the text using some particular software like turnitin can help detect the percentage of plagiarized materials. This software is recommended because; it scrutinizes the text accurately bringing out any plagiarized content within paragraphs. Some students are fun of applying spun, that is changing the original text but, using the author’s ideas. The software can also help to detect such cases whether it is totally or partially copied. Teachers can still make use of online search engines by either uploading the content or typing part of a suspected portion to check if there is any previous material on that. By doing this, the issue of copied material can be dealt with.