Across the UK hundreds of thousands of international students pursue a higher degree through the medium of L2 English, attending the same lectures and reading the same texts as their L1 counterparts.  Although most of these international students will have initially passed through some form of English language proficiency gate-keeping exercise (such as minimum required IELTS scores), little allowance may be made thereafter for possible gaps in necessary vocabulary knowledge. Thus, L2 students may be implicitly assumed either to have sufficient working knowledge of the required vocabulary, or to be able to “pick up” this vocabulary knowledge incidentally during the course of their studies.

This paper explores whether the Academic Word List (AWL) and subject-specific vocabulary knowledge of L2 undergraduates taking a degree in Biology at a UK university is, in fact, comparable to that of their L1 counterparts.  Results from a vocabulary test administered in the third week of Semester 1 of the first year of studies indicated a relatively substantial gap between the levels of vocabulary knowledge of L1 and L2 students. This gap was particularly apparent in knowledge of lower-frequency AWL vocabulary. A post-test was administered 28 weeks later, towards the end of the students’ first year at university. This paper will report on the results of the post-test and discuss to what extent this previously perceived linguistic “gap” between L1 and L2 students may have increased or decreased. The paper will also outline a follow-up investigation into the ways in which L2 students deal with unknown vocabulary encountered during the course of their undergraduate degree studies.

In some academic settings where English is not the first language it is nonetheless common for reading to be assigned in English, and the expectation is often that students will acquire subject terminology incidentally in the first language as well as in English as a result of listening and reading. It is then a prerequisite that students notice and engage with terminology in both languages. To this end, teachers’ classroom practices for making students attend to and engage with terms are crucial for furthering students’ vocabulary competence in two languages. Using transcribed video recordings of eight undergraduate lectures from two universities in such a setting, this paper provides a comprehensive picture of what teachers ‘do’ with terminology during a lecture, i.e. how terms are allowed to feature in the classroom discourse. It is established, for example, that teachers nearly always employ some sort of emphatic practice when using a term in a lecture. However, the repertoire of such practices is limited. Further, teachers rarely adapt their repertoires to cater to the special needs arguably required in these settings, or to exploit the affordances of multilingual environments.

In settings in which English is used as a medium of instruction (EMI) in parallel with another language, a common expectation is that students will acquire subject terminology incidentally in the L1 as well as in English as a result of listening and reading. It is then a prerequisite that students notice and engage with terminology in both languages. To this end, teachers’ classroom practices for making students attend to and engage with terms are crucial for furthering students’ vocabulary competence in two languages. Using transcribed video recordings of a sample of lectures from two courses in a partial EMI setting, in which the lectures were in Swedish and the textbooks were in English, this paper will present a comprehensive picture of what teachers ‘do’ with terminology during a lecture, i.e., how terms are allowed to feature in the classroom discourse. It is established, for example, that teachers nearly always employ some sort of emphatic practice when using a term in a lecture. However, the repertoire of such practices is limited. Further, teachers rarely adapt their repertoires to cater to the special needs arguably required in partial EMI settings, or to exploit the affordances of these learning environments.

With the objective of determining what academic vocabulary students use productively, and exploring the relationship between receptive and productive academic vocabulary, this paper continues the dialog on what constitutes academic vocabulary. By adopting a set of principled criteria (ratio, dispersion, discipline specificity and range) and by approximating the procedures from a recent study of academic vocabulary, the academic vocabulary found in students' writing is identified and subsequently compared to the academic vocabulary found in published academic writing (indexical of receptive purposes). Nearly 600 words emerge as being represented significantly more frequently in students' academic writing than in their non-academic writing, demonstrating that students distinguish in their writing between academic and non-academic vocabulary. Furthermore, the investigation finds significant differences between students' productive academic vocabulary and academic vocabulary serving receptive purposes, suggesting that students' productive and receptive academic vocabulary needs are far from identical. The findings reported here are intended to serve as a tool for EAP educators working to help students develop academic vocabulary fit for purpose, as well as an incentive for EAP researchers to continue to explore the nature of academic vocabulary. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The conference abstract or proposal is a promotional genre, intended to secure the acceptance of a paper at a conference and often (especially in the 'hard' disciplines) in subsequent proceedings. It is therefore, as Hyland and Tse (2005) note, a high-stakes genre, and therefore one which early-career researchers need to master.

One promotional resource is to show the research to be novel and original; to demonstrate (in Swales' 1990 terms) that a gap exists in the research literature.  Given that a significant proportion of space in abstracts is given over to material which corresponds to the introduction in the paper itself (Cutting, 2012), opportunities for highlighting the gap exist.  However, not all authors take advantage of this opportunity.  reported that Just over 40% of the TESOL abstracts were found not to contain a 'gap statement' (Halleck and Connor, 2006) . 

One factor driving the propensity to include a gap statement (or not) appears to be first language (Yakhontova, 2006). In addition, novice researchers may be less likely to deploy this feature which can help them promote their work.

This paper will report the results of an investigation into conference asbstracts in the sciences and engineering. Two corpora, one consisting of abstracts written by postgraduates during an academic writing course, and one consisting of accepted and published abstracts were analysed for two features: the presence or absence of a 'gap' statement, and the lexical and structural routines used for describing the gap. Comparisons between the corpora will be presented, and implications for the academic writing classroom will be addressed.

References

Cutting, D. J. (2012). Vague language in conference abstracts. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 11, 283–293.

Halleck, G. B., & Connor, U. M. (2006). Rhetorical moves in TESOL conference proposals. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5, 70–86.

Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2005). Hooking the reader: a corpus study of evaluative that in abstracts. English for Specific Purposes, 24, 123–139.

Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yakhontova, T. (2006). Cultural and disciplinary variation in academic discourse: The issue of influencing factors. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5, 153–167.

The number of university programmes taught exclusively through the medium of English around the world is rising, and when the partial use of English is taken into account (for example, when the language of instruction is the local language but the textbook is in English), then the role of English in higher education is seen to be pervasive indeed. The increasing use of English has, however, been driven to a great extent by policy, rather than by bottom-up preferences on the part of participants in English-medium settings, making it relevant to ask what their perceptions and understandings of the phenomenon are.

This paper will present the results of a large-scale survey of Swedish university teachers and their views on and experiences of the use of English in higher education. The findings show that teachers identify both positives and negatives, but also describe a situation in which there are only limited attempts to accentuate the former and mitigate the latter.

In the context of a pronounced internationalization trend in Swedish higher education, this paper investigates university teachers’ attitudes towards and practices of using English as medium of instruction. Findings from questionnaire and interview data indicate diverse attitudes and a widespread lack in specific pedagogical practices that promote language learning.

English is increasingly used nowadays as a medium of instruction in tertiary education worldwide, facilitating the outward mobility of home universities' staff and students, as well as the inward recruitment of international faculty and students. However, teaching and learning in a foreign language can be a challenging enterprise, and the implications of the trend toward English-medium instruction (EMI) are to date not fully understood. Based on a large-scale survey, this study aims at unveiling the perceptions and experiences of Swedish university teachers involved in EMI. The respondents express a wide array of views and experiences, grouped under ten thematic areas. The respondents' views are often polarised in that they identify both costs and benefits of teaching in English, while describing a reality where little support is provided to augment the benefits and mitigate the costs. These results indicate a need for enhanced communication with all stakeholder groups, to raise critical awareness about impending costs, as a step toward minimizing potential damages and maximizing the benefits of English in higher education today.

In the globalised university environment, many university students are expected to learn subject-specific terminology in both the local language and the L2 (English) by learning from two media in two different languages: lectures in the local language and reading in L2 English. These students' bilingual learning is greatly affected by the learning strategies they employ. An experiment was designed to investigate the effects of student choice of learning media and the order of media on their learning and perception of learning of terminology in English. The results confirm that added exposure to terminology in different media, even in different languages, contributes to learning and show that, in some circumstances, learning terminology from reading may be more effective than learning it from a lecture. The results also show that students do not correctly judge their knowledge of terms learnt from different media in different languages and that they underestimate knowledge gained from reading in L2. Implications for teaching are discussed.

Referring to other scholars’ work is an important component of research writing, and one which requires careful attention in order to convey the writer’s stance toward the reported propositions and their relationship to each other and to the writer’s own work. Second language writers often find it difficult to master the skill of selecting appropriate forms for reporting verbs, and this is an area in which English for Academic Purposes (EAP) materials and teachers are called upon to provide guidance. However, accounts of reporting verb usage have demonstrated that this is a complex area, and simple prescriptions or proscriptions are not suffi-cient: appropriate choices are dependent on the relationship between form and func-tion, both locally and globally in the citing text. The present paper extends the exist-ing research literature on reporting verbs by examining some of the factors which guide the citing writer’s choices. Implications for the EAP classroom are also taken up.

This chapter first provides an understanding of what plagiarism means, as a foundation on which the other chapters can build. It then tests whether it is possible to achieve a functional definition of plagiarism. As the canonical repository of definitions, dictionaries may seem to be a logical place to start the search. However, most dictionary definitions of plagiarism are rather shorter than those found in university policies, and this suggests that they are insufficient for academic purposes. A survey of plagiarism policies at Chinese universities found that they differed from their Anglophone counterparts in that they lacked explicit definitions, and shifted among several terms for plagiarism in a way which was potentially confusing for students. As Tadros (1993) has pointed out, academic writers have a binary choice to make between attributing something to a source or averring it themselves, and averral is the default condition, and what the reader assumes in the absence of attribution.

Researchers and teachers frequently distinguish between English as a foreign language and English as a second language. Although this distinction usefully highlights some of the differences in the settings in which English, like other languages, is learned, it fails to capture many of the complexities of language learning. Writing is used here as a lens to inspect the blurred boundaries between the conceptual categories of EFL and ESL.

Plagiarism is a particularly complex issue because it straddles the boundary between academic integrityand academic literacy. Academic texts are widely understood to involve complex and precise expressionand rhetorical sophistication. Learning to write them is rarely easy, but writers who are working through asecond language face an additional challenge. Because of a trend toward increased international mobility among students, the number of inexperienced academic writers using a second language is large and rising rapidly. If, as it has been suggested, this group is especially likely to be charged with plagiarism, then there is a real danger both to the students in this group and to standards of academic integrity. This chapter examines the aspects of plagiarism which are of particular relevance to second-language writers, identifies potential problem areas, and suggests solutions.

Plagiarism is a particularly complex issue because it straddles the boundary between academic integrity and academic literacy. Academic texts are widely understood to involve complex and precise expression and rhetorical sophistication. Learning to write them is rarely easy, but writers who are working through a second language face an additional challenge. Because of a trend toward increased international mobility among students, the number of inexperienced academic writers using a second language is large and rising rapidly. If, as it has been suggested, this group is especially likely to be charged with plagiarism, then there is a real danger both to the students in this group and to standards of academic integrity. This chapter examines the aspects of plagiarism which are of particular relevance to second-language writers, identifies potential problem areas, and suggests solutions.

Plagiarism is a broad and multidisciplinary field of study, and within second-language (L2) writing, research on the topic goes back to the mid-1980s. In this review article we first discuss the received view of plagiarism as a transgressive act and alternative understandings which have been presented in the L1 and L2 writing literature. We then survey and identify salient themes in the growing body of work relating to plagiarism, primarily from an L2 writing/applied linguistic perspective. These themes include terminological distinctions; views of the role of textual plagiarism in language learning and a writer's development; a concern with students’ and teachers’ sometimes differing understanding of plagiarism; and disciplinary differences in perceptions of plagiarism. We review research into the role of the electronic media in changing orientations toward plagiarism, the potential role of culture as a cause of plagiarism in the work of L2 writers, and pedagogical approaches to guiding students away from plagiarism. Methodological issues in researching plagiarism are surveyed, and the article concludes by suggesting directions for future research.

Intertextuality in its broadest sense—the relationship between two texts—is a pervasive feature of academic writing, as manifested by features such as citations to earlier texts and the sets of features such as structure and organisation which are shared by texts in a given genre and/or academic discipline.

Many of the intertextual features of academic writing, such as the choice of reporting verb and verb form, have been thoroughly researched and described (e.g., Charles, 2006; Shaw, 1992). Much is also know about a specific, highly problematic form of intertextuality: plagiarism (e.g., Pecorari & Shaw, 2012). However, less attention has been given to the ways in which novice academic writers become aware of conventional intertextual practices, and less still to the transferability of this feature to writing in the workplace.

This paper will present the results of a corpus-based investigation of intertextuality in two domains: the leisure-time reading which lower-division undergraduates do, and a common workplace genre.  By triangulating the results from these two corpora with existing findings about the intertextual features of academic texts it will be possible to describe the extent to which these features overlap with, or diverge from, each other.  This will thus provide an indication of the features which can reasonably be expected to transfer from one domain to another, and which cannot, and should therefore be the subject of explicit instruction in the English for Specific Academic Purposes classroom.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book have suggested many possible ways in which appropriate intertextuality can be fostered in higher education. Plagiarism enters a teacher's field of vision as a distraction. The everyday tasks of planning and delivering instruction and assessing its outcomes have to be put on hold while the plagiarism is dealt with. University teachers are frequently concerned that their students should be able to produce writing of high quality. The demands of the academic discipline, the teaching context, the size of the student group and many other factors affect the nature of assessment writing tasks. Students are often extremely worried about the formatting of references, with their attention focused on commas and italics. Automated plagiarism detection is something many teachers would like to see because the task of identifying plagiarism in a large number of texts is both laborious and haphazard.

Student Plagiarism in Higher Education is a crucial read for any university teacher concerned about plagiarism. It provides the tools and information needed to assess this often complex international phenomenon constructively and effectively from a variety of angles, and provides a framework for further discussion and research.

Each chapter poses a question about an essential aspect of plagiarism and examines the central theoretical, ethical and technical questions which surround it. Providing a unique perspective on the topic of academic plagiarism, this book: 

addresses questions which are vexing in teaching practice, but for which ready answers are not available in professional skills development materials;  

relates plagiarism to wider issues of learning and intellectual development;  

collates the thinking of international leading experts on the topic of plagiarism from different areas of the academy.  

Student Plagiarism in Higher Education provides an excellent insight which thoroughly interrogates all aspects of the plagiarism argument. Theoretically based and carefully considered contributions from international experts ensure that this volume is an invaluable asset to anyone wishing to read more, learn more and think more about plagiarism.

Intertextuality is a prominent feature of academic writing, and the ability to use sources effectively and appropriately is an essential skill which novice writers must acquire. It is also a complex skill, and student performance is not always successful. It is presumably beneficial for students to receive consistent messages about what source use is and is not appropriate, but some evidence suggests that university teachers and other gatekeepers may fall short of this consistency. This paper reports the findings of semi-structured text-based interviews aimed at understanding the basis of teacher attitudes and responses to intertextuality in academic writing. Teachers who were asked to evaluate the same examples from student texts differed in their judgments about whether the examples were appropriate, and provided different types of explanation for their judgments. These explanations enable us to develop a four-part typology of intertextuality which allows analytic discussion of differing judgments. The implications both of the teacher judgments and of the typology for second language writing instruction are discussed and an assessment of the relevance of our findings for the theme of this special issue is provided.

Tertiary education in many countries is increasingly bilingual, with English used in parallel with the national language, particularly as a reading language. This article describes the results of a survey of student attitudes toward, and reading practices regarding, English language textbooks. Over 1,000 students at three Swedish universities responded to a questionnaire asking about their experiences with English textbooks. Textbooks written in English were generally unpopular, and the perception was widespread that they placed a greater burden on students. However, respondents were divided about whether their reading behavior and their learning outcomes were affected by having a textbook in English, and about whether English texts were desirable. The findings of this study have implications for teaching practices in contexts in which students are asked to read, or are being prepared to read, in a second language. Implications for the English as a foreign language or English as a second language classroom are discussed.

This paper reports the findings of a study of undergraduate student use of, and attitudes toward, textbooks and other assigned reading. More than 1200 students of various subjects at three Swedish universities were surveyed. Most students said reading played an important role in learning generally and attributed positive characteristics to their textbooks. However, students’ self-reported reading behaviour was at odds with these attitudes, with many students reporting some degree of non-compliance with reading assignments and a small group of students expressing active resistance to completing reading assignments. Although textbooks were perceived as valuable, students reported a preference for learning course content from other resources, such as lectures and lecture notes. Textbooks were perceived as alternatives, rather than complements, to attending class. Differences were found across academic disciplines. Implications of these findings for educational administration and classroom practice are discussed.

In a parallel-language environment the use of textbooks in English in coursesotherwise in the local language is naturalized and not widely discussed orquestioned. The aim of this study was to elicit the attitudes and syllabusinfrastructure that underlie the practice. A large-scale survey was carried out andanswers were obtained from over 20% of teachers at Swedish universities.Results confirmed that a majority regarded English as important during and/orafter university studies and showed that they considered the use of Englishlanguagetextbooks as providing a useful opportunity for incidental languagelearning. In strong contrast to the situation in a content and language integratedlearning environment, only a small minority of courses were reported to haveany specified learning outcome related to English. Open answers showedawareness of the benefits and risks of parallel-language practices, but no interestin making aims explicit. In our view, there is no contradiction between incidental learning and explicit aims, and course aims which remain implicit make rationalplanning and constructive alignment more difficult. They also inhibit discussionof appropriate methodology.

In a parallel language environment it is important that teaching takes account of both the languages students areexpected to work in. Lectures in the mother tongue need to offer access to textbooks in English and encouragementto read. This paper describes a preliminary study for an investigation of the extent to which they actually do so.A corpus of lectures in English for mainly L1 English students (from BASE and MICASE) was examined for thetypes of reference to reading which occur, classifi ed by their potential usefulness for access and encouragement. Suchreferences were called ‘intertextual episodes’. Seven preliminary categories of intertextual episode were identifi ed. Insome disciplines the text is the topic of the lecture rather than a medium for information on the topic, and this categorywas not pursued further. In the remaining six the text was a medium for information about the topic. Three of theminvolved management, of texts by the lecturer her/himself, of student writing, or of student reading. The remainingthree involved reference to the content of the text either introducing it to students, reporting its content, or, really themost interesting category, relativizing it and thus potentially encouraging critical reading. Straightforward reportingthat certain content was in the text at a certain point was the most common type, followed by management of studentreading. Relativization was relatively infrequent. The exercise has provided us with categories which can be used for anexperimental phase where the effect of different types of reference can be tested, and for observation of the referencesactually used in L1 lectures in a parallel-language environment.

Intertextuality is a pervasive feature of all discourse, but norms and conventions vary widely across domains. Academic conventions can cause difficulties for those who have been exposed to, or move on to, domains with other practices. Academic conventions are well documented; here we examine those of business writing. We created a corpus of chairman’s statements from annual corporate reports and searched them for signalled and unsignalled intertextual relationships. We hypothesise that statements from the same company will be linked by both repeated phraseology and acknowledged intertextuality.

This chapter speaks to university teachers who are concerned about plagiarism and want to address it constructively, but feel that they may not have all the tools or information they need to do so. It approaches the issue from a variety of theoretical angles in order to provide a framework for discussion and research. Jordan Canzonetta addresses the issue of trust between teachers and students, and the role which plagiarism, and tools for detecting plagiarism, play in that important relationship. Deceptive intertextuality exists, as Anton's student exemplifies, but non-deceptive unconventional intertextuality can arise by accident even when one knows the conventions, as Ezra's error shows. Regardless of the perspective adopted, some plagiarism at least needs to be situated in the context of other breaches of academic ethics, a broad category which includes acts perpetrated by both students and teachers. Plagiarism, then, is an outlier, a misfit, a square peg in the landscape of good and bad writing behaviours.

Although institutional plagiarism policies around the world vary greatly in terms of the degree of specificity in their provisions, many share a number of common characteristics. Policies typically describe mechanisms according to which suspected individuals can be first judged, and then, if found guilty, sanctioned. Extending the criminal justice metaphor further, institutional policies and procedures for dealing with suspected instances of plagiarism can be said to have two closely related objectives: to identify and punish the guilty (while not mistakenly identifying or punishing the innocent) and to use the threat of detection and punishment to deter transgressive behaviour. The intrinsic value of both of these objectives is clear, but the extent to which institutional practices meet them depends not only on effective detection and deterrence, but also on promoting student learning. This paper questions the extent to which a culture of detection and deterrence promotes the core business of learning in two very different contexts, Sweden and Australia. Swedish universities are (with a single exception) within the public sector and funded, run and regulated by central government.

Australian universities, by contrast, are much more heterogeneous in the way that policies are developed and implemented. The language, as well as the process, for plagiarism management varies across institutions By comparing institutional approaches to plagiarism management in different national contexts, we explore ways in which cultures of honesty are shaped at the level of policy. What are the expectations of universities about promoting ethical learning and establishing a culture of academic honesty in their learning spaces? How are these expectations envisaged in policy? Are these visions achieved in practice? In addressing these issues through an analysis of policy documents and interview data from teaching staff, plagiarism policies apparently focus on detection and deterrence mechanisms at the expense of promoting learning for students. In both Sweden and Australia it appears that existing disciplinary mechanisms disappoint staff in their efforts to shape a culture of honesty.