An Overview of Theories Explaining Plagiaristic Behavior of Students

In academic writing, creating own text integrating appropriate sources is one of the troublesome areas for both L1 (for whom English is the first language) and L2 (for whom English is the second language) writers. As a result, to meet the writing demand of the academia an inexperienced writer adopts the technique of using other peoples’ language and concepts without acknowledging the source- which is known as “plagiarism”, a kind of academic dishonesty. However, there has been an outstanding dichotomy among the researchers regarding the reasons for plagiarism in academic writing committed by students. One group of researchers consider students as solely responsible for committing plagiarism. By this cohort of researchers, students’- lack of knowledge and skill in source acknowledgement, poor time management, busy schedule, procrastination, deficiency in academic writing, absence of ethical reasoning, attaining recognition- are mentioned as primary reasons of plagiarism. On the other hand, the other group of scholars brings forth the issue of responsibility of the educational institutions and academics as well. In this review, standpoints of scholars of both the schools explaining reasons of plagiarism are presented in a brief. Keywords: Plagiarism, theory, dichotomy, responsibility, educational institutions. DOI: 10.7176/JEP/10-25-11 Publication date:September 30th 201