Plagiarism in L۲ Academic Writing: a Theoretical Perspective

چکیده مقاله

Even though plagiarism and research literature on this topic are not new to the academia, the authors of the present work believe that it still needs to be raised, emphasized, researched, and discussed in journals and conferences on applied linguistics in Iran. The reason is that, to us, it is imperfectly understood in spite of its frequent occurrence and high stake consequences. The purpose of the present paper is a) to explore how plagiarism is to be understood based on the related literature, b) to enumerate the main reasons why plagiarism is committed in our context, c) to summarize current lines of anti- plagiarism research and instruction, and d) to familiarize the audience with how new advancements can be used to control it. Based on the above discussion, the paper ends with hopefully valuable recommendations on 1) the recognition as well as avoidance of plagiarism by novice researchers, 2) the control of possible harms and consequences of committing plagiarism to the existing knowledge and to the future of academia, 3) manipulation of penalties and operationalization of control rules over academic written texts and finally 4) the development and/or purchase of more sophisticated plagiarism detection soft-ware.