Sowden's Article On Plagiarism Among International Students

Introduction

Plagiarism is using someone else’s work or ideas as our own. Using someone’s idea without reference is also plagiarism. The simplest way to explain plagiarism is stealing someone else’s work. In this essay, I would like to present my response to the problems mentioned in Sowden’s (2005) article about plagiarism among international students. I have divided my essay into three parts. The first part, I will focus on Sowden’s main idea about plagiarism and I will argue with the claim he made, and I am going to use Liu’s (2005) article to support my arguments. The second part, I will also discuss on Sowden’s unwarranted claim about plagiarism in Asian culture and I will use Liu (2005) and Le Ha’s (2006) articles to support my comments.

Sowden (2005, p.2) points out that the problem with multilingual students is on understanding the concept of plagiarism as they come from different culture background with different comprehension about plagiarism. Although, he gives some examples about Japanese students who failed to cite the author’s argument and Chinese academic norms about the philosopher’s words were belonged to everyone, but in fact, the information would seem to be rather unreliable as he has not been done any research for this context and using Asian ESOL students for examples. I agree with Liu’s (2005, p. 1) claims about the culture background. He mentions that the culture background is not the only major factors in plagiarism. There are many other things to consider being the factors of plagiarism, such as inadequate of writing

It is definitely unacceptable to plagiarise someone else’s work as our own and the concept of plagiarism has already existed in China for ages. According to Liu’s (2005) article, he throws down gauntlet on Sowden’s claim that plagiarism is acceptable in China, but manifestly the concept of plagiarism is already existed for thousand years. As cited in Liu (2005, p.2), Ci Yuan (1998: 197) mention that “ a very famous Tang Dynasty poet who lived fromn773 to 819, used the term ‘piao chie’ to deplore the fact that quite a few scholars resorted to plagiarism”. It shows us that Sowden’s assumption is wrong and his claim is rather unwarranted. According toLe Ha (2006), memorising good writing or famous idea does not mean recommending plagiarism but showing respect or politeness to authority. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh’s famous statements usually used in their writing and they always give the source by simply adding ‘says Uncle Ho’ without providing the details. It is allowed because his statement is classified as common knowledge. Therefore, Sowden’s claim would seem to be