September 30, 2009/ Interaction

One of the interesting issues to me in Casanave chapter 5 is that reading and writing courses need to be incorporated because “we cannot teach L2 students about audience or textual borrowing without involving them deeply in reading activities” (p. 185). It reminds me of when I was taught English reading and writing courses separately, which made me assume that these two skills are discrete. The first time I encountered the concept of audience and plagiarism was when I took an academic writing course in the US. But the teacher simply emphasized how important those concepts are in writing and we, especially international students, should be very careful not to borrow others’ ideas improperly. Then we had to write a paper with that in mind. If I had done reading activities that specifically focused on audience and how to borrow others’ ideas in a proper way in the academic discourse community, it would’ve been easier for me to understand and apply those in my writing.

Surely, reading benefits writing not only in these two aspects but also other aspects of writing. In addition, some international students have almost no previous literary background in English. American students read a lot of books in and outside school before they enter the classroom. If all of the reading experience in the target language is reading textbooks and grammar books, it’s not surprising that foreign students have difficulties in grasping concepts easily that are taken for granted by native English speakers.

Although how we define plagiarism considering cultural and historical factors is important, we researchers try to go beyond mere defining the concept and understanding how challenging it would be to international students. If you have many international students in your class, you need to spend much more time on writing and reading activities focusing on audience and how to not plagiarize than in class with American students. Once teachers understand that what Americans take for granted doesn’t come naturally and easily to students from different backgrounds, they will provide more examples from great literary works or articles, writing activities for practice, or feedback related proper citation, instead of saying how important it is at the beginning of the class and blame students upon their paper at the end of the semester.