Abstract

Plagiarism and intellectual property law are two issues that affect every student and every teacher throughout the world. Both concepts are concerned with how we use texts - print, digital, visual, and aural - in the creation of new texts. And both have been viewed in strongly moral terms, often as acts of 'theft'. However, they also reflect the contradictory views behind norms and values and therefore are essential to understand when using all forms of texts both inside and outside the classroom. This book discusses the current and historical relationship between these concepts and how they can be explicitly taught in an academic writing classroom.

Joel Bloch has taught L2 writing for over 20 years in the United States, China, and Ukraine. He has an MA in literature from York University (Toronto), an MA in ESL education from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University. He currently teaches writing and theory courses at the Ohio State University. He has published â??Technologies in the Second Language Composition Classroomâ?? as well as numerous articles on technology, plagiarism, intercultural rhetoric, and academic writing.

I think “Plagiarism, Intellectual Property and the Teaching of L2Writing” contains many interesting insights that will help inform the debate around plagiarism and encourage teachers of writing, whether with L1 or L2 students, to put promoting authorship and thus academic integrity at the heart of their work...This useful and thought-provoking book should be required reading for teachers who are interested in exploring how a wider understanding of the complexities of plagiarism and intellectual property might help them support students developing their writing skills on academic programmes.

Bloch sheds much light on two intertwined topics that have long vexed students, teachers, and school administrators alike: plagiarism and intellectual property. By putting these concepts into historical and cross-cultural perspective, Bloch helps us appreciate both the complexity of the issues involved and a pedagogical approach that may take much of the angst out of source text use in a second language.

In this book Joel Bloch, a widely respected scholar of authorship theory and the textual production of multilingual writers, offers a much-needed exploration of the relationship between plagiarism and copyright. That this exploration takes place in the context of L2 writing makes this book exponentially more important. Kudos to Professor Bloch for offering a well-articulated entry in what I hope will become a lively ongoing conversation.