Collaborative learning, while not an entirely new concept (as pointed out by Prof. Cope) is still considered to be a controversial approach to education. In the United States, for example, the dominant culture idealizes the individual as a lone entity independent of his/her fellow citizens. This cultural climate has proved fertile ground for successful entrepreneurs, but also creates a society in which many more of its members are doomed to be "failures.” The pressure to achieve without the appearance of any social support (and better still, in spite of social skepticism or disdain) is so great that many would-be "winners" are later discovered to be … cheaters. Politicians who run for office on "family values" cheat on their wives; executives in charge of multi-million dollar corporations cheat on their taxes; champion athletes cheat on their drug tests, and so on.

In academia, cheating has become synonymous with “plagiarism.” Any sort of socially-unacceptable academic behavior, from asking your friend a question to looking up an answer online, risks bringing down the opprobrium of the administration via failing grades, disciplinary panels and even expulsion. Schools are obsessed, it would seem, with the “plagiarism epidemic” [1]: They encourage professors to use external software (on no doubt a pricey contract) with companies like Turnitin to catch the “bad” students, and even adopt Turnitin’s corporate branding to promote its product on their own institutional websites [2]. They advocate for the especially noxious Honorlock, which monitors a student’s behavior during a test via his/her own computer camera. Aside from the questions surrounding Honorlock’s racial bias and inflexibility for individual disabilities [3], the anxiety that would lead a teacher to invade his/her student’s home privacy for the sake of an online quiz borders on paranoia … all the while inviting Fareed Zakaria to campus or maintaining the honorific of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gerald Nelms has written a simple but straightforward critical overview of current research on plagiarism, along with some examples of how students may not actually intend to plagiarize, or do so without a full understanding of its nature or consequences [4]. I would like to add another explanation for plagiarism in the field of language-learning. First, identifying technical “plagiarism” in a foreign-language student text is easy. A student writing in a second- or third-language is not yet attuned to the differences in style that s/he can perceive in his/her own writing, and so copies without being aware of how out-of-context the copied text really is. The would-be plagiarist might make intentional mistakes to give the copied text some veneer of authenticity, but winds up making mistakes with simple constructs and leaves more sophisticated structures intact. The inside jokes about Google Translate fails among foreign-langauge teaching assistants are legion [5].

One of the major causes of plagiarism in foreign-language classes, however, are the teacher’s unrealistic expectations. We may encourage students to express themselves “in their own words,” but students may not have “their own words” in a second language. Every word is a foreign word, every expression a copied or memorized phrase form a textbook, an audio script or a PowerPoint presentation. Indeed, the entire point of teaching a foreign language is to get students to copy and adopt the words of others until they become incorporated as their own (or close enough to pretend as such on a study-abroad excursion.) The point of foreign-language learning, it might be said, is successful plagiarism.

To that end, I agree with Prof. Cope and others that a new approach to plagiarism is worth consideration. It certainly would save universities a lot of time and money in preventing, identifying and disciplining plagiarists. In my classes I actively encourage the use of dictionaries, reference works and incorporating set phrases. I also try to base assignments on students’ own experiences so they are not tempted to overinvest in content and research, and thus better focus their efforts on how they express themselves in the target language. I permit limitless rewrites (“you write it, I’ll read it,” I tell them). And when I do come across a clearly copied text in an otherwise original essay, I consider the plagiarism to be a symptom of the learner’s struggle: Are they struggling with their class schedules? Do they feel overwhelmed by the material? Do they not believe they are capable of succeeding in school? Those, in my experience, are the root causes of academic plagiarism, and my responsibility as a teacher is to reassure my students that of course they are capable of success, that they deserve to be in my class, that they have everything they need to be where they are now, and they are worthy to arriving where they want to be in the future.