Cultural Differences May Lead to Plagarism

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In today’s information society, it is possible that plagiarism may be caused by cultural differences. According to Hayes and Introva (2011, P.213), “plagiarism occurs when a student uses someone else’s language, ideas or other original material without acknowledging its source.”. In this essay, the influence of cultural differences to plagiarism and the associated problems will be investigated, the corresponding corrective measures will also be explained. Bamford and Sergion (2005) note that, students with different cultural backgrounds may have different perceptions to plagiarism, so that students may have admitted to plagiarism without realizing it. To address this problem, Hayes and Introna (2011) suggest that when examining the presence of plagiarism, instructors may need to understand the differences in perception to plagiarism due to cultural differences. Guidelines should also be given to students for better understanding with the characteristics of plagiarism and citation skills that can be used in order to avoid plagiarism (Bamford and Sergion, 2005). It is probably quite common for institutions to teach students using paraphrasing to avoid plagiarism. Yet, Walker (2008) investigates that students who know how to do effective paraphrasing probably find it difficult to apply the skills onto complex paragraphs. An effective way to tackle the problem, suggested by Diekhoff et al. (1996) is the Universities can provide support for students on the effective ways to cite sources and minimize the class size so that students would be able to obtain more instructions from the instructors. Personally, paraphrasing is probably challenging to handle, when some words have exact meanings in which it may be difficult to find another phrase or word to replace the originals without changing the meaning. To solve this problem, Yamada (2003) not that writers
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