Investigating Attitudes toward Plagiarism among Post-Graduate ELT Students

Abstract

Plagiarism, which is regarded as one of the examples of academic misconduct, is a proposed research area in many fields. The students’ awareness level and their attitudes toward plagiarism is a matter of study in higher education level as well and has implications in English Language Teaching (ELT). However, upon researching the literature, it has turned out that there has been a limited number of studies on attitudes toward plagiarism among post-graduate ELT students. To this end, this study aimed to fill the gap in the literature by investigating their attitudes toward plagiarism in a descriptive survey design. Data were collected by using Attitudes Toward Plagiarism (ATP) questionnaire, developed by Mavrinac et al. (2010). The respondents of the study were 30 post-graduate ELT students from universities in Turkey. Findings of the study demonstrated that post-graduate ELT students strongly disagreed with attitudes which somehow seemed to support or justify plagiarism. The results put forward that the participants approached plagiarism quite negatively. They did not consider plagiarism as acceptable, and they believed it was not an issue to be taken lightly. However, when it came to their attitudes toward self-plagiarism, they turned out to perceive it more moderately. The current investigation uncovered that the participants did not have a full understanding of plagiarism. On the basis of the findings, there was a need to raise the awareness levels of post-graduate ELT students. Furthermore, necessary recommendations were put forward to broaden the knowledge and awareness levels of post-graduate ELT students about plagiarism.