Perspectives of L2 graduate students and their professors about student's academic writing practices: Patchwriting or plagiarism?

Writing academic texts is a challenging endeavour for novice L2 writers, which causes them to rely heavily on the original texts. Some studies have differentiated intentional acts of fraud (like plagiarism) from patchwriting which they claim is unintentional source text reliance. However, others have a negative view toward it. The present study explores L2 graduate student writers and their professor's perspectives about these different writing practices and how they may work for or against developing professional writing expertise in a discipline. Survey questionnaires and interviews were used to collect data. The results were analysed through calculating frequencies and percentages as well as inductive data analysis for transcribed interviews. The results showed that many graduate students used patchwriting in their attempts to write academic texts unintentionally and intuitively. The reasons identified for patchwriting were student's lack of confidence to write independently, inability to paraphrase or fear of not expressing the writer's message thoroughly, and, in some cases, the writer's intention to get around plagiarism detection softwares. However, both students and their instructors had negative views about patchwriting. They believed that writing strategies like patchwriting could not lead to professional writing practices in a discipline. More importantly, the students seemed to continue this practice all through their studies, which may be a sign of not receiving enough instruction and feedback in this regard. The role of explicit teaching is emphasized in making students familiar with the differences between paraphrasing and patchwriting.