Originality

A home essay must be the student’s own work. Plagiarism is not tolerated:

(i) unattributed quotes: if a home essay contains ‘quotes’ without quotation marks and explicit and precise identification of their source, the student who has submitted it gets grade ‘1’ (i.e. fail) as her/his seminar mark (no matter how innocent her/his mistake is) regardless of her/his results and work during the term;

(ii) covert quotes: covert quotes (more-or-less transparently rewritten passages from source count as quotes and have to be treated in the same way (see point (i) above);

(iii)amount of quotes and covert quotes: not more than 15 per cent of an essay can consist of quotes (overt or covert);

(iv) shameless plagiarism: if a student submits somebody else’s work, s/ he will fail and will have to appear before the disciplinary committee of the Faculty.

Figure 15. Extract from the HERTE of the Linguistics Department

It can easily be appreciated how a novice writer could interpret these sternly worded guidelines as meaning that 85% of the essay had to consist of the student’s own ideas, and that if they failed to follow this, the consequences would be severe. It was clear, however, that Linguistics teachers had no such expectation, as has already been seen. Without reassurance and explanation from their teachers, which few students received, this wording put a lot of students under needless pressure, and the teachers themselves were not always overly sympathetic:

FP: And I think that they felt, maybe they misunderstood that, I think they felt that 80% had to be from them.

Ling1: Well, yes, of course. Yes, I mean, text wise, or sentence wise, yes. Yeah.

What can I say? . . . Well you know, we were satisfied with saying ‘The two sources quoted above all consider the genitive to be more a semantic problem than a functional one. Now, however, I’m going to cite three other books, one published in Britain and two abroad which, however, approach this, obviously because they’re text books, from a practical point of view’. I mean that’s fine, I mean that’s your paper. (Ling. Teacher 1, p. 3)

This teacher did, however, appreciate that it was useful to know about this problem and that there might be a need “maybe to encourage them a bit more that it’s, basically, really it’s like a music school where you don’t have to be a composer at this stage, you have to be more a performer” (Ling. Teacher 1, p. 4).

Another teacher, who himself felt that the HERTE “should be rewritten to be a bit more comprehensible” (Ling. Teacher 5, p. 4), had experienced the students’ confusion at first hand, even to the point of having “some panicking students writing me emails in the middle of the night before handing in the paper” (Linguistics Teacher 5, p. 6). This teacher felt that the guidelines were misleading and he had taken steps to reassure his students in class and individually:

Well, how I interpret is that it’s, it was again confusingly written in that, I think what it meant to do was that you can’t just take a paper and paraphrase it in your own words, but obviously for first-years, I mean you can’t write a paper with 15 per cent of taken content and then 85 per cent of your own new theories about it.

With the theses at the linguistics department you’re still expected to use about 75 per cent of your paper for the review of literature, and the rest is your own work, if you have the capabilities for that.

So, and a lot of my students came up to ask me ‘Does this mean we can only spend, I don’t know, a page and a half or a page with stuff that we’ve read from books and then the rest we have to come up ourselves?’ and ‘No, no, no, no. It’s just that you don’t take whole paragraphs or something’, I think that’s what it meant. And that was another reason why I thought it was quite confusing and I had to help. (Ling. Teacher 5, p. 5)

It was clear from the anxiety expressed by some of the other students that not all of the teachers had felt the need to reassure their students over this point. However, as Linguistics Teacher 5 himself pointed out, it was likely this would be a learning experience that they would not forget – “And they’ll remember that anyway” (Ling. Teacher 5, p. 5) – although having it clearly explained to them while they were involved in writing the paper, rather than realising it afterwards, would obviously make it a more constructive learning experience.

While it is evident that many of the students found the detailed academic style requirements contained in the two and a half pages of the HERTE document to be somewhat off-putting, it is also obvious such requirements are an essential part of academic work and it is therefore useful for students to begin familiarising themselves with them sooner rather than later. The difficulty and necessity of learning formal academic requirements was acknowledged by Linguistics Teacher 3:

I think that sometime they will have to face the HERTE, and I don’t think it makes a difference if they look at it and try to acknowledge the requirements on the third year or the second year or first year. I think it is equally difficult to use these rules for the first time. (Ling. Teacher 3, p. 2)

This particular teacher also felt that the Introduction home paper performed a useful role for exactly that reason: it allowed the students to make mistakes and learn from them. He felt that it was much better for them to do this earlier rather than later in their academic careers:

Ling3: There was an idea at the Department that we should abolish the requirement that Introduction to Linguistics students should write an essay, but then all the mistakes they commit when writing the Introduction to Linguistics essay would

come and turn up when they write the Syntax 1 or Phonology essays and History of English essays and, well, I think it is a good approach to have them write.

FP: Yeah, so you can tackle those problems earlier?

Ling3: Yes, immediately after they enter this level of education.

(Ling. Teacher 3, p. 2)

While Linguistics teachers were more concerned about students learning formal requirements, some of the Literature teachers also felt that it was important for students to start writing early. For instance, Literature Teacher 3 “would give actually priority to writing, at the beginning of their training here at the university” (Lit. Teacher 3, p. 2), not just to help with formal or language problems, but because she sees writing as being something which has been

“neglected to some extent in recent years” (Lit. Teacher 3, p. 2) at school.

This point about students being able to familiarise themselves with basic academic requirements early on was borne out by the testimony of the students themselves in some cases. For instance, Sarah found that the task was more manageable than she had at first anticipated. She was one of the students who was alarmed at the restrictions over the use of quotations:

The hardest was there were these criteria. I don’t know how they were called, these, I think it was – this HERTE, yeah. And there were some criteria so /?/ that, I don’t know how many per cent has to be our own ideas. And that was where we got frightened because we didn’t learn anything about the topic. And then we went up to the teacher and asked ‘How shall we do now? Because we, we have no own ideas about this or, or nearly nothing. Just few ideas maybe. Or when we compare something then we can include our own suggestions, but nearly nothing’. And then he, he said that ‘All right, calm down! You don’t have to keep yourself to this per cent’. And then it was easier because then we saw that it’s not so strict. So we couldn’t, we didn’t have to keep all these rules, so very strict. (Sarah, Int. 3, pp. 5-6) Of course, Sarah had some previous experience of writing short academic essays at school, but even for students with little or no writing experience, they would eventually have to write their thesis and so they needed to begin somewhere, as pointed out by Literature Teacher 2:

“Well I think it’s important because they have to start somewhere, and we have to be able to

find out how well or not well they write” (Lit. Teacher 2, p. 8). Students who experienced significant problems with academic writing requirements would not be helped by leaving it until later to find out what these problems were.

6.3.2.6 Developing coping strategies for difficult papers. While they were engaged with these demanding home paper tasks, first-year students developed a range of coping strategies to help them. Most of these strategies enabled them to develop their writing, although not all were equally successful in doing so, but a few of the strategies were rather ways of avoiding difficult assignments and therefore were not constructive. In fact, these avoidance strategies also flouted academic rules. The strategies are listed below and will be described one by one.

• Learning to plan ahead

• Talking to other students about assignments

• Working in a team

• Asking for help from a teacher

• Reading other students’ essays

• Getting another student to write the essay

• Plagiarising from the internet

Learning to plan ahead. One way in which demanding papers, which were mostly Linguistics papers, challenged the students was in the matter of planning and time management. Some students adopted a systematic approach to the task. This was particularly noticeable in the library research stage already mentioned. Sarah began working on her Introduction to Literature paper in plenty of time, which allowed her to do a good job.

Although she found it very hard at first, over a period of three weeks with her fellow students,

“when we had a half an hour or an hour between two classes then we just went over to the Library” (Sarah, Int. 3, p. 5). As a result of her hard work she managed to get a 4 for her

essay. Monica felt that there was “big stress on us, and on me, because this was the first paper that we . . . had to write” (Monica, Int. 3, p. 3), but she did “a lot of research in the Library and it was just very terrible spending all day, days there” (Monica, Int. 3, p. 3). As a result, she did not find the writing so difficult and the teacher wrote a plus sign on her paper, which meant that it was very good and would improve her overall mark for the course.

However, those students who did not begin working seriously on the Introduction paper until very late, and there were several of them, found that it was impossible to produce a very good paper. Gergely spent some time a few weeks ahead making notes and photocopying sources but did not leave himself much time to write the essay: “ I had to hurry with it but I said that ‘Oh I, it, it won’t be a very long time to write it’. And then I, mm, I guess I spended [sic] a long weekend, I think” (Gergely, Int. 3, p. 6). Gergely did not get a very good mark on the essay (5 points out of 10 from Linguistics Teacher 3) because he failed to answer four of the 10 questions satisfactorily and he lost a point for using the wrong citation format. Afterwards he observed that he had at least learnt something from the experience: “I can say, (pause) at least now I know how to not, how not to write” (Gergely, Int.3, p. 7). When it came to writing his next Linguistics paper in the second semester, he also showed that he had learnt another important lesson:

I’m doing this Phonetics and Phonology seminar in Linguistics, and we also have, we will have a paper, and, I’d like to write it in a better way, than the previous one because (pause) it will depend on the topic of it but I would say that, [I’ll] do my best.

(Gergely, Int. 3, p. 9)

Fiona was also well aware that she had not done a good job on her first paper. Partly she blamed her teacher for this because they did not talk about the paper in class, but she was honest enough to acknowledge that being expected to work independently was a part of university culture: “And so we were left there totally on our own, which I guess is normal on the university but I was not quite prepared for it” (Fiona, Int. 3, p. 4). She also acknowledged

that she left it much too late to begin the research and that this resulted in her not having enough material to help her write the essay:

And I didn’t really collect anything for it. So it was like, I think it was the week before, so I had about a week left and then on that week I started collecting – no, actually I had to hand it in on Tuesday and I started it on Friday. So, umm, yeah. So that’s how it turned out! So it’s not a good piece of writing. . . . And I just tried to answer the questions with many examples and whatever. So that was my problem actually – that I couldn’t write enough. And that’s probably because I didn’t have, I didn’t copy enough from books and from other books to get started on. (Fiona, Int. 3, p. 4)

However, when she took Phonetics and Phonology in the second semester she made sure she did not make the same mistake twice: “This one I started on really early because last year I was very bad at it, or last semester” (Fiona, Int. 5, p. 6). She even managed to hand in the paper early as her teacher had requested, and this may have paid off because, although there was no comment at all on the paper itself, the grade was a 5 and the teacher was clearly pleased with her work:

She said that, when she saw it, I mean she said that mine was fine and I got a 5 on it and I didn’t have to write the last test paper either because she said I would get it because, we already wrote two and, whatever. And she said I mean if you, she saw that you worked on it really then, she said that’s good. (Fiona, Int. 5, p. 8)

In this case it was clear that Fiona liked both the teacher and the course much better than the Introduction course and teacher, but her much improved performance on the home paper was largely as a result of her learning experience with her first home paper, and specifically the need to begin research work early.

Julie was another student who left it to the last moment to get her Introduction paper written:

But on the genitive essay on Linguistics, that was kind of in the last moment. So I just put it together (pause) – yeah, it took a lot of time to put it together but to, to make it a real essay I didn’t put, make attention, so I just typed it and ‘Okay, let’s hand it in’. I didn’t even proofread it, so. It was a rush. (Julie, Int. 3, p. 3)

She made a number of mistakes with the formatting, and although her teacher gave her a 4 for the essay, it was clear from the comment on the cover sheet that he was not overly impressed:

Proofread before handing it in!

Follow citing instructions!

Not a truly interesting linguistic essay (don’t be afraid to argue!) 4

(Linguistics home paper cover sheet, teacher’s comment, Introduction, Julie)

Unlike Fiona, Julie did not learn from her experience. She wrote her second paper for Syntax 1 in a single day and her teacher refused to read it because of the numerous mistakes he found in the References. Julie later recognised this lack of planning as being a recurrent failing of hers: “I should have started all the things on time, because I always leave things to the last moment and that’s bad” (Julie, Interview 6, p. 4). It may be that in the future, being aware that this was a particular problem of hers, Julie would learn to cope better with managing her academic work.

Talking to other students about assignments and working in a team. Talking to other students about a difficult home paper task and working in a team on the library research part of the task was mentioned by seven of the students. This often involved discussing the task with class mates or students from other classes who were working on the same paper and then sharing resources. Sarah used this strategy when writing her Introduction to Linguistics essay:

At the end everybody held their breaths. So just we went there and ‘What have you found? Have you found anything to that question?’. And then we sit, sat, sit together and, and tried to help each other because– So there were also some questions for which there were many answers. And then we couldn’t decide what to do and the end we said it’s some kind of research so we could just put down that it’s, that person had this and the other /?/ that and then, how we figured. It was very hard as, as a first task.

(Sarah, Int. 3, p. 5)

She found it more difficult to use the same strategy when she had to write her paper for Syntax 1 because the assignment was different for different groups:

Because we just always go round and ask the others what they have as home essay topics because then we can help [one] another easier if we know what’s going on.

Last year we had the same, so the whole, whole group, so all groups had the same, and it was easy because we could help each other. And now just ask ‘How are your home essays? How are you going on?’, and /?/ ‘Oh, I have an absolutely different topic, sorry!’ So it was harder to cooperate in that way. Therefore I think we didn’t cooperate so much as last semester. (Sarah, Int. 5, p. 9)

But eventually she was able to work with another girl from her group she met in the library:

Then just we worked together, naturally of course, and help each other that ‘Look, I have found this chapter in this book – that’s the one we’re looking for. All right’, and then ‘Look I have found this one’ and put it together, but I don’t know what her name is. So it’s a bit strange. (Sarah, Int. 4, p. 5)

Brigi also worked with her class mates on the Syntax 1 home paper in this way: “So in this course we talked to each other and nobody knew anything. But then we discussed our problems and together found sources. Everybody said one book, and then we found five sources, five books” (Brigi, Int. 5, p. 7).

Some of the Linguistics teachers were highly suspicious of this sort of student cooperation on home papers. Linguistics Teacher 3 was worried that for the Introduction paper, students from different groups would come together to write one essay and “hand it in to several teachers, I don’t think there is a way that I could prove that it was written by several students or just one student and the others just bought the paper” (Ling. Teacher 3, p. 7), and Linguistics Teacher 4 had similar qualms: “Well I have some reservations about it in the sense that I (pause) I’m not sure whether they will actually produce it individually, if you see what I mean” (Ling. Teacher 4, p. 3). However, this cooperative approach to a task fits very well with Lave and Wenger’s (1991) notion of situated learning in communities of practice, and in effect these students were helping each other to learn how to approach research problems and how to adopt discourse practices while being on the periphery of a discourse community.

There was no indication that in any of these cases students had actually produced the same essay together; they merely shared the library research. It was clear from Sarah’s description of writing her Syntax 1 paper, for example, that after finding the relevant sources in the library, the rest was solitary work:

With the readings I had two weeks because I just, in the evenings when I had time or on the bus, on the tr- on the tram I just read the articles, or the cha- – they were not articles they were chapters. So certain chapters of these books. And I tried to take notes or just highlight them, the most important parts.

And then, I wasn’t thinking much about how to write it so I took what he told us at the class and, and according to that method I just took these cases and explained them.

. . . so I sat down twice. . . . So from 10 to, I don’t know, 12 o’clock or so, and then in the afternoon I continued again. (Sarah, Int. 5, p. 6)

Asking for help from a teacher. Student cooperation assumed a greater importance in view of the fact that teacher assistance in these tasks was often difficult to get. Some teachers did give some help in class, as Sarah mentions in the above quote, but others gave very little or none, like in Fiona’s Introduction to Linguistics seminar: “We didn’t talk about the home paper. He just told us that this is the title, this is where you can get the stuff, um, about it”

(Fiona, Int. 3, p. 4). When students went to teachers for help it was not always forthcoming, as in the case of Vilmos in his first half semester:

FP: Were you given much help by your teachers?

Vilmos: Yeah. Well, not by all of them. There are some teachers who – especially some of the doctoral students – who think that if we register for a subject then we already know everything in the field and classes should be only, like scientific, academic, or whatever discourse. But then again there were some who were very very helpful. (Vilmos, Int. 1, p. 5)

The case of Vilmos is a particularly interesting one since, owing to the collapse of his plans to spend a year working for a charitable organisation before beginning his university studies, he had to start in the Spring semester of 2005. In order for him to cope with having to write four seminar papers without any previous experience and without having attended the ASC, he adopted several strategies, one of which was asking teachers for help. He was given help by one of his seminar teachers: “Actually the teacher who helped me a lot was also a doctoral student and she taught the English novel seminar” (Vilmos, Int. 1, p. 5). This was useful for his Literature papers but for Linguistics his teachers were not so helpful, so Vilmos was forced to look for help elsewhere.

Reading other students’ essays. Another very important survival strategy in that first half year for Vilmos was reading other students’ essays. Not having done the Introduction to

In document DOKTORI (PhD) DISSZERTÁCIÓ (Pldal 164-200)