Sunday, September 27, 2009
INTERACTION
INTERACTION, AUTHORSHIP, TEXTUAL BORROWING AND PLAGIARISM
I. OVERVIEW
A. Casanave, Chap.5: Interaction
Briefly and basically: Teachers’ awareness on interaction, audience and textual borrowing in writing class.
1. Interaction between the writer and: reader, peer writers, imagined or real audiences, evaluators, critics, etc. (p. 157, para 1)
1.1. For audience design: Audience in mind while writing
a. Real audience: teacher, examiners, peer reading (more beneficial: friendly, interaction, live feedback, p. 167, para 2)
b. Electronic audience: No confrontation, freedom, secure alone before the screen (Matsuda’ experience, p 165, para 2)
1.2. Against audience in mind: Frustrating, constraining and threatening (Elbow, p. 168)
2. Plagiarism
a. Widespread in academic settings (US, Japan, p. 171-172)
b. Culturally, socially and historically constructed: no black-white definition (tentative definition on p. 173
c. Teachers’ role of explaining learners what plagiarism is.
B. Pennycook: Borrowing others' words: Text, ownership, memory and plagiarism.
Briefly and basically: Understanding plagiarism as a contextualized construct in relationship with text, memory, and learning.
1. Diachronic discourse about authorship
a. Mimetic in pre-modern: Divine inspiration
b. Productive in modern era: authorship (still traces of imitation)
c. Parodic in post-modern era: Knowledge socializationand death of the author (p. 204)
2. Gray areas of plagiarism
a. Some learners do not really understand what plagiarism is: word, idea, both?
b. Chinese education based on memorization
c. Veneration of old textual authority
d. Memorization for better understanding.
3. Teachers' supportive attitude instead of sanction-oriented pedagogy
4. Borrowing other’s word as a part of learning process and plagiarism as a social, historical and cultural construct in perpetual transformation
"...to try to consider self-reflexively how a particular notion of authorship and ownership has grown up, how it is a very particular cultural and historical tradition and may now be undergoing transformation, how our students may be operating from fundamentally different positions about texts and memory. All language learning is to some extent a process of borrowing others' words and we need to be flexible, not dogmatic, about where we draw boundaries between acceptable or unacceptable textual borrowings." P. 227
II. CLASS DISCUSSION.
1. Theoretical and methodological questions
a. While discussing the diachronic discourse of the concept of authorship, Pennycook tends to juxtapose the mimetic to the parodic era. (P. 204). Both terms have almost the same meaning and yet both historical periods are substantially different in knowledge construction and authorship. How do you get to understand the author’s thought?
b. How do you find Casanave’s conclusions on electronic audiences (p. 168-169) and section on against audience (p. 169)? Did she adopt a reserved tone/voice because she did not want to sound more authoritative (modest) or she did not have enough data to draw on and make an informed decision, which would have given her more authority?
2. Pedagogical questions:
a. In most cases, peer review is seen as a beneficial practice to learners. (p. 167, para 2). However, to what extent will it be critically useful in societies whereby learners—based on social norms— are reluctant and sensitive to critique? Does peer review free teachers from their coach's role? Otherwise, how do they come into the game?
b. Is it pragmatic to teach writing or to write without audience design in mind (As suggested by Elbow, p. 168)? If so, should such an approach be an end itself or just a step in writing process?
c. As a composition teacher, how do you detect a plagiarized text if you are not familiar with the plagiarized material ? In case it happened in your class, how would you handle the issue?
d. Since plagiarism is always contextualized, how is it perceived in your academic milieu?
e. Could you provide some practical advice about raising learners’ awareness on plagiarism?
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Responding to 1.2 - Elbow's argument against audience.
ReplyDeleteOf course this is impossible to do, you can't empty your head of the world when you write. You can't shut off the voices. But you can quiet them down enough when working on that first draft and fall into a kind of trance that lets you dump your ideas in the beginning. This starts the writing, and some can't begin otherwise.
It's not ethnocentric, but it is egoistic (not to be confused with egotistic). Again, the idea is that after your draft is done, after the hard part is over with, you turn everything back on, you start thinking about audience and alternate perspectives and rhetorical effects, and then you rewrite.
Elbow is offering a strategy for getting past the tough part - those first few moments when you're staring at a blank page and you lock up with fear. Good news, Elbow says, there's nothing to be afraid of when you're the only person in the world.