- Email: [email protected]
Plagiarism, Intellectual Property and the Teaching of L2 Writing
198
Book reviews / System 41 (2013) 192e206
value judgement to “explore and identify the different ways in which situations might be evaluated from various personal and cultural standpoints” (p. 45). Houghton argues that these processes encourage considered and critical judgement of otherness according to clear and conscious standards and promote learner self-awareness, metacognitive awareness, meta-affective awareness and intellectual empathy. While Houghton’s model is theoretically and empirically grounded, her claim that its nature is “causal”, meaning that the proposed didactic ordering leads to intercultural learning, has yet to be empirically validated. In Chapters 6 and 7 Houghton carefully takes the reader through the application of her Intercultural Dialogue Model in the classroom, which she illustrates with numerous examples from her rich learner data. These illustrative sections are indeed one of the highlights of the book and make for a fascinating read. At stages 1e3 her intervention focusses on the learners’ own value-laden conceptual frameworks before mapping out the interlocutor’s perspective as accurately as possible, temporarily suspending evaluation. Houghton argues that these processes are strongly dependent on the cognitive skill of intellectual empathy, which is one of the key concepts in the book. Stages 4e6 aim to develop learners’ abilities to consciously compare self and other based on explicit evaluative standards, as well as their meta-cognitive and meta-affective awareness during reflection. They also seek to promote self-development, that is, reorientation of the self towards the other as a result of considering alternative value-laden conceptual systems. Chapter 8 focusses on the application of Houghton’s model to the analysis and evaluation of social structures as part of citizenship education. She discusses topics such as persuasion and propaganda, language and ideology and intercultural mediation, which again she illustrates very well with her learner data. In this last chapter on intercultural competence as part of citizenship education, she also explains the ways in which her model supports approaches that seek to bring learner values in line with certain evaluative standards, such as democratic principles. She proposes the values of Benevolence, Stimulation, Universalism and Self-Direction as targets for intercultural education. Houghton closes the chapter by referring back to her introduction. She describes a case of social transformation through critical analysis and civic action, which ended the struggle of gaikokujin kyoushi in Japan e the very same struggle from which her work on managing value judgement in foreign language education originated. As the title suggests, Houghton’s research has a very practical orientation and the potential to connect with a teacher readership, although its academic style and extended theoretical discussions might resonate much more with an academic audience. Within the latter readership, it is most relevant and useful for those with an interest in intercultural education and foreign language teaching. References Bennett, M.S., 1993. Towards ethnorelativism: a developmental model of intercultural sensitivity. In: Paige, R.M. (Ed.), Education for the Intercultural Experience. Intercultural Press, Yarmouth, ME, pp. 21e72. Byram, M., 1997. Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon. Byram, M.S., 2009. Intercultural competence in foreign languages: the Intercultural speaker and the pedagogy of foreign language education. In: Deardorff, D. (Ed.), The SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence. SAGE Pubications, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 321e332. de Bono, E., 1991. I am Right: You Are Wrong. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.
Gianna Hessel Department of Education, 15 Norham Gardens, Oxford OX2 6PY, UK E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2013.01.011
Plagiarism, Intellectual Property and the Teaching of L2 Writing, Joel Bloch. Multilingual Matters, Bristol, UK (2012). pp vii þ 178.
Bloch’s book deals with “the growing complexity of being literate” (p. 111) and specifically how students can learn to manage academic intertextuality appropriately in the digitalized environment. Bloch underlines the historical,
Book reviews / System 41 (2013) 192e206
199
economic, cultural, and generic specificity of modern western views of academic intertextuality. Ultimately, his view is that this complexity and specificity requires the replacement of ‘theft’ conceptualizations of plagiarism with more appropriate metaphors. The ideas centre on writing classes for ‘international’ students, and discussion ranges over literary, entertainment and research genres, and a variety of media. A frequent theme is that notions of student plagiarism have grown up together with notions of intellectual property in other domains, so that the two influence one another. Bloch draws on sources in composition studies, English for academic purposes, academic literacy and on law cases in an attractively eclectic way, but in terms of style and attitudes his book is recognizably within a compositionstudies tradition. The first chapter reviews beliefs about the causes of what is perceived as an epidemic of plagiarism, with recent examples from the public sphere. The most interesting point Bloch makes here is that attitudes to intellectual property and plagiarism are influenced at least as much by economics as by culture, and perhaps most of all by technological change. Bloch’s familiarity with Chinese universities is useful here and throughout the book. The second chapter is a historical review of the development of intellectual property law and the notion of plagiarism. Legal provisions and decisions can be seen as located in the tension between the benefit to society of freely available information and the need to protect and support the efforts of creative individuals. The issue was explicitly formulated like this by the early nineteenth-century utilitarians. An attractive analogy is made between the notion of Jeffersonian freedom in the US west and the freedom Pirate Bay would look for on the Internet. In this context, the US legal construct of ‘fair use’ is seen as providing a valuable counterbalance to potentially excessive emphasis on ownership. The chapter is rich in insights, such as the likelihood that the shift in attitudes to international copyright in the late nineteenth-century US was contingent on the country becoming a net exporter of ‘intellectual property’. Bloch concludes that copyright and plagiarism issues need to be resolved according to local demands and needs rather than to fixed international or even cross-university norms. There is also a review of the legal cases that are defining copyright issues on the Internet, and a discussion of the rise of the dominant ‘property and theft’ metaphor in conceptualisations of plagiarism, mentioning rivals such as ‘commons and enclosure’. The final section of this chapter is called ‘Differences between Intellectual Property Law and Plagiarism’ but does not address the fundamental difference that one is a type of code designed to define legitimate practice, and the other is a type of practice defined by its illegitimacy according to some code. Readers would have welcomed clarification of the ways in which concepts of different types can be linked, since the linkage is clearly real and important. The short, third chapter discusses the difficulty that intellectual property law causes teachers in general and writing teachers in particular in the context of the Internet. This is mainly in the context of legal definitions of fair use of online material for teaching purposes. The chapter concludes with a list of connections between intellectual property and plagiarism, that is, between a concept and a practice partly dependent on that concept, which is difficult to interpret for the reasons already mentioned. Chapter 4 is focused on the notion of plagiarism in university work. An initial historical overview reveals the great prevalence e and tolerance e of cheating in early nineteenth-century US universities and the rise of concerns over plagiarism (and of paper mills selling essays, apparently) towards the end of that century. This development was associated with university reform on the professionalized German model and with the tightening of US copyright law in the period. It is also associated with increased rigour and precision in the citation practices of research writing, which one might call a move to a writer-responsible view of intertextuality and away from a reader-responsible one which persists, Bloch suggests, in China. Here and elsewhere reference is made to changes in the conditions of copyright brought about by the requirements and affordances of Internet resources. Bloch continues to discuss the problem of the teacher’s dual responsibility for policing and training, which can, he suggests, be resolved by treating issues of intertextuality as local, with different norms in different environments. In the fifth chapter Bloch aims, after a somewhat unexpected but useful detour into on-line resources teaching about plagiarism, to find a better metaphor for illicit intertextuality than the ‘law and crime’ or ‘property and theft’ one that dominates university discourse. Bloch argues convincingly that game theory provides a ‘rule and infraction’ metaphor which would more appropriately express the situated and localized nature of intertextuality practices. Different games have different rules and the purpose of the rules is to ensure satisfactory games. Students should essentially see conventions for citation as rules enabling strategic decisions for ‘winning’ the game of a particular genre, and writing classes should lead them in this direction. Chapter 6 then discusses the development of writing courses that would meet these requirements. A first requirement is that plagiarism is not seen as something dealt with by an initial warning and then merely
200
Book reviews / System 41 (2013) 192e206
punished, but that intertextuality practices are dealt with as an integrated part of all writing. Citation should be a genre-appropriate rhetorical strategy strengthening ethos, rather than a defensive gesture against accusations of plagiarism. Bloch’s group investigated the attitudes of several groups to plagiarism. Among the students in their writing course for ‘international’ students, they found widely varied attitudes, and hence no clear sense of what is appropriate. A particularly interesting point was that they found considerable agreement that a professor has the right to use his students’ findings, implying that students have no copyright in their own material and are not ‘players’ in the academic game. Without a sense of ownership or of their own voices in their texts, students cannot adopt appropriate intertextual strategies. Teachers on the writing programme generally agreed that their classes should constitute a safe haven for participants to experiment and for them to establish appropriate local practices, while teaching assistants on their programme with experience of other academic environments underlined the importance of training in plagiarism. As a consequence, the department launched a writing course based on the topic of plagiarism, aiming to help students perceive themselves as players in the academic game, bound to exploit its rules. Participants read a number of stories and a few articles about plagiarism and wrote their own summaries and source-based papers on its nature and causes. Tasks were structured so that students cited one another’s work and the multimodal story required considerations of ‘fair use’ as well as giving credit. Students wrote blogs, discussed the issues and, most interestingly, created, and used Creative Commons to copyright, a multimodal digital story using on-line material in the tradition of digital remixes. This made them creators or transformers in the on-line environment they were supposed to be familiar with. This course deliberately avoids training in specific disciplinary practices to encourage reflection about citation and authorship in general. As I have hinted above, the weaknesses of the book are its unclear definitions, somewhat unclear organization, and possibly its focus on writing classes and teachers rather than disciplinary writing and teachers. The lack of structural or metadiscoursal clarity is problematic because at the text level the book is badly proofread and subedited. Frequent missing words and odd constructions mean that one does not know when to trust a particular formulation literally and when to take it as intended to mean what the context suggests. Faced with the sentence “At the same time, much of the fear many educators have of the ‘epidemics’ from the concern about how often our student have used the intellectual property they have access to” (p. 67), readers can construct the intended meaning. But this turns reading into a psycholinguistic guessing game (Goodman, 1967) with a vengeance and encourages a style of reading in which undue attention is paid to whether or not what is said is what is intended, so that metalinguistic and structural guidance is sorely needed. Nonetheless, those involved in the problems of intertextuality in academic writing in the digital age should not miss this book. Its judicious account of cultural(-economic-historical) aspects of textual borrowing, its fascinating historical details, its concern for teaching praxis and innovative course proposals, and above all its demonstration that a new metaphor might actually bring a new conceptualization make it a welcome addition to the growing literature on intertextuality practices. Reference Goodman, K.S., 1967. Reading: a psycholinguistic guessing game. Journal of the Reading Specialist 6, 126e135.
Philip Shaw Department of English, Stockholm University, S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2013.01.008
Book reviews / System 41 (2013) 192e206
value judgement to “explore and identify the different ways in which situations might be evaluated from various personal and cultural standpoints” (p. 45). Houghton argues that these processes encourage considered and critical judgement of otherness according to clear and conscious standards and promote learner self-awareness, metacognitive awareness, meta-affective awareness and intellectual empathy. While Houghton’s model is theoretically and empirically grounded, her claim that its nature is “causal”, meaning that the proposed didactic ordering leads to intercultural learning, has yet to be empirically validated. In Chapters 6 and 7 Houghton carefully takes the reader through the application of her Intercultural Dialogue Model in the classroom, which she illustrates with numerous examples from her rich learner data. These illustrative sections are indeed one of the highlights of the book and make for a fascinating read. At stages 1e3 her intervention focusses on the learners’ own value-laden conceptual frameworks before mapping out the interlocutor’s perspective as accurately as possible, temporarily suspending evaluation. Houghton argues that these processes are strongly dependent on the cognitive skill of intellectual empathy, which is one of the key concepts in the book. Stages 4e6 aim to develop learners’ abilities to consciously compare self and other based on explicit evaluative standards, as well as their meta-cognitive and meta-affective awareness during reflection. They also seek to promote self-development, that is, reorientation of the self towards the other as a result of considering alternative value-laden conceptual systems. Chapter 8 focusses on the application of Houghton’s model to the analysis and evaluation of social structures as part of citizenship education. She discusses topics such as persuasion and propaganda, language and ideology and intercultural mediation, which again she illustrates very well with her learner data. In this last chapter on intercultural competence as part of citizenship education, she also explains the ways in which her model supports approaches that seek to bring learner values in line with certain evaluative standards, such as democratic principles. She proposes the values of Benevolence, Stimulation, Universalism and Self-Direction as targets for intercultural education. Houghton closes the chapter by referring back to her introduction. She describes a case of social transformation through critical analysis and civic action, which ended the struggle of gaikokujin kyoushi in Japan e the very same struggle from which her work on managing value judgement in foreign language education originated. As the title suggests, Houghton’s research has a very practical orientation and the potential to connect with a teacher readership, although its academic style and extended theoretical discussions might resonate much more with an academic audience. Within the latter readership, it is most relevant and useful for those with an interest in intercultural education and foreign language teaching. References Bennett, M.S., 1993. Towards ethnorelativism: a developmental model of intercultural sensitivity. In: Paige, R.M. (Ed.), Education for the Intercultural Experience. Intercultural Press, Yarmouth, ME, pp. 21e72. Byram, M., 1997. Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon. Byram, M.S., 2009. Intercultural competence in foreign languages: the Intercultural speaker and the pedagogy of foreign language education. In: Deardorff, D. (Ed.), The SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence. SAGE Pubications, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 321e332. de Bono, E., 1991. I am Right: You Are Wrong. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.
Gianna Hessel Department of Education, 15 Norham Gardens, Oxford OX2 6PY, UK E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2013.01.011
Plagiarism, Intellectual Property and the Teaching of L2 Writing, Joel Bloch. Multilingual Matters, Bristol, UK (2012). pp vii þ 178.
Bloch’s book deals with “the growing complexity of being literate” (p. 111) and specifically how students can learn to manage academic intertextuality appropriately in the digitalized environment. Bloch underlines the historical,
Book reviews / System 41 (2013) 192e206
199
economic, cultural, and generic specificity of modern western views of academic intertextuality. Ultimately, his view is that this complexity and specificity requires the replacement of ‘theft’ conceptualizations of plagiarism with more appropriate metaphors. The ideas centre on writing classes for ‘international’ students, and discussion ranges over literary, entertainment and research genres, and a variety of media. A frequent theme is that notions of student plagiarism have grown up together with notions of intellectual property in other domains, so that the two influence one another. Bloch draws on sources in composition studies, English for academic purposes, academic literacy and on law cases in an attractively eclectic way, but in terms of style and attitudes his book is recognizably within a compositionstudies tradition. The first chapter reviews beliefs about the causes of what is perceived as an epidemic of plagiarism, with recent examples from the public sphere. The most interesting point Bloch makes here is that attitudes to intellectual property and plagiarism are influenced at least as much by economics as by culture, and perhaps most of all by technological change. Bloch’s familiarity with Chinese universities is useful here and throughout the book. The second chapter is a historical review of the development of intellectual property law and the notion of plagiarism. Legal provisions and decisions can be seen as located in the tension between the benefit to society of freely available information and the need to protect and support the efforts of creative individuals. The issue was explicitly formulated like this by the early nineteenth-century utilitarians. An attractive analogy is made between the notion of Jeffersonian freedom in the US west and the freedom Pirate Bay would look for on the Internet. In this context, the US legal construct of ‘fair use’ is seen as providing a valuable counterbalance to potentially excessive emphasis on ownership. The chapter is rich in insights, such as the likelihood that the shift in attitudes to international copyright in the late nineteenth-century US was contingent on the country becoming a net exporter of ‘intellectual property’. Bloch concludes that copyright and plagiarism issues need to be resolved according to local demands and needs rather than to fixed international or even cross-university norms. There is also a review of the legal cases that are defining copyright issues on the Internet, and a discussion of the rise of the dominant ‘property and theft’ metaphor in conceptualisations of plagiarism, mentioning rivals such as ‘commons and enclosure’. The final section of this chapter is called ‘Differences between Intellectual Property Law and Plagiarism’ but does not address the fundamental difference that one is a type of code designed to define legitimate practice, and the other is a type of practice defined by its illegitimacy according to some code. Readers would have welcomed clarification of the ways in which concepts of different types can be linked, since the linkage is clearly real and important. The short, third chapter discusses the difficulty that intellectual property law causes teachers in general and writing teachers in particular in the context of the Internet. This is mainly in the context of legal definitions of fair use of online material for teaching purposes. The chapter concludes with a list of connections between intellectual property and plagiarism, that is, between a concept and a practice partly dependent on that concept, which is difficult to interpret for the reasons already mentioned. Chapter 4 is focused on the notion of plagiarism in university work. An initial historical overview reveals the great prevalence e and tolerance e of cheating in early nineteenth-century US universities and the rise of concerns over plagiarism (and of paper mills selling essays, apparently) towards the end of that century. This development was associated with university reform on the professionalized German model and with the tightening of US copyright law in the period. It is also associated with increased rigour and precision in the citation practices of research writing, which one might call a move to a writer-responsible view of intertextuality and away from a reader-responsible one which persists, Bloch suggests, in China. Here and elsewhere reference is made to changes in the conditions of copyright brought about by the requirements and affordances of Internet resources. Bloch continues to discuss the problem of the teacher’s dual responsibility for policing and training, which can, he suggests, be resolved by treating issues of intertextuality as local, with different norms in different environments. In the fifth chapter Bloch aims, after a somewhat unexpected but useful detour into on-line resources teaching about plagiarism, to find a better metaphor for illicit intertextuality than the ‘law and crime’ or ‘property and theft’ one that dominates university discourse. Bloch argues convincingly that game theory provides a ‘rule and infraction’ metaphor which would more appropriately express the situated and localized nature of intertextuality practices. Different games have different rules and the purpose of the rules is to ensure satisfactory games. Students should essentially see conventions for citation as rules enabling strategic decisions for ‘winning’ the game of a particular genre, and writing classes should lead them in this direction. Chapter 6 then discusses the development of writing courses that would meet these requirements. A first requirement is that plagiarism is not seen as something dealt with by an initial warning and then merely
200
Book reviews / System 41 (2013) 192e206
punished, but that intertextuality practices are dealt with as an integrated part of all writing. Citation should be a genre-appropriate rhetorical strategy strengthening ethos, rather than a defensive gesture against accusations of plagiarism. Bloch’s group investigated the attitudes of several groups to plagiarism. Among the students in their writing course for ‘international’ students, they found widely varied attitudes, and hence no clear sense of what is appropriate. A particularly interesting point was that they found considerable agreement that a professor has the right to use his students’ findings, implying that students have no copyright in their own material and are not ‘players’ in the academic game. Without a sense of ownership or of their own voices in their texts, students cannot adopt appropriate intertextual strategies. Teachers on the writing programme generally agreed that their classes should constitute a safe haven for participants to experiment and for them to establish appropriate local practices, while teaching assistants on their programme with experience of other academic environments underlined the importance of training in plagiarism. As a consequence, the department launched a writing course based on the topic of plagiarism, aiming to help students perceive themselves as players in the academic game, bound to exploit its rules. Participants read a number of stories and a few articles about plagiarism and wrote their own summaries and source-based papers on its nature and causes. Tasks were structured so that students cited one another’s work and the multimodal story required considerations of ‘fair use’ as well as giving credit. Students wrote blogs, discussed the issues and, most interestingly, created, and used Creative Commons to copyright, a multimodal digital story using on-line material in the tradition of digital remixes. This made them creators or transformers in the on-line environment they were supposed to be familiar with. This course deliberately avoids training in specific disciplinary practices to encourage reflection about citation and authorship in general. As I have hinted above, the weaknesses of the book are its unclear definitions, somewhat unclear organization, and possibly its focus on writing classes and teachers rather than disciplinary writing and teachers. The lack of structural or metadiscoursal clarity is problematic because at the text level the book is badly proofread and subedited. Frequent missing words and odd constructions mean that one does not know when to trust a particular formulation literally and when to take it as intended to mean what the context suggests. Faced with the sentence “At the same time, much of the fear many educators have of the ‘epidemics’ from the concern about how often our student have used the intellectual property they have access to” (p. 67), readers can construct the intended meaning. But this turns reading into a psycholinguistic guessing game (Goodman, 1967) with a vengeance and encourages a style of reading in which undue attention is paid to whether or not what is said is what is intended, so that metalinguistic and structural guidance is sorely needed. Nonetheless, those involved in the problems of intertextuality in academic writing in the digital age should not miss this book. Its judicious account of cultural(-economic-historical) aspects of textual borrowing, its fascinating historical details, its concern for teaching praxis and innovative course proposals, and above all its demonstration that a new metaphor might actually bring a new conceptualization make it a welcome addition to the growing literature on intertextuality practices. Reference Goodman, K.S., 1967. Reading: a psycholinguistic guessing game. Journal of the Reading Specialist 6, 126e135.
Philip Shaw Department of English, Stockholm University, S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2013.01.008