Plagiarism Tutorials in English Academic Writing for L2 Vietnamese Undergraduates - Study Aims to Investigate Perceptions Before and After

Oct 15, 2026

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Plagiarism is increasingly widespread across educational institutions, yet Vietnam’s tertiary teaching has given it limited attention. This study examines Vietnamese undergraduates’ perceptions of plagiarism in English academic writing before and after receiving plagiarism tutorials aligned with APA standards. Before training, 44 students wrote essays and 10 were interviewed; Turnitin reported that 35/44 plagiarized. Students showed poor understanding of plagiarism and lacked knowledge of citing and quotation practices. The findings inform tutorial content and recommend integrating pedagogy principles and offering seminars or workshops to raise awareness across departments.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryExam

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time48 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

1. Introduction

Internet and plagiarism risks

Plagiarism detection and tutorial interventions

The Vietnamese context and research gap

Plagiarism Tutorials in English Academic Writing for L2 Vietnamese Undergraduates Hieu Manh Do Department of English and Philosophy, Murray State University, USA [domanhhieubc@gmail.com](domanhhieubc@gmail.com) Bio-Profile: Hieu Manh Do is a Doctoral candidate (Doctor of Arts in English pedagogy-English with a specialization in TESOL) at Murray State University, USA. He earned his master’s degree in TEFL from National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan. His main interests include English for Specific Purposes (ESP), English for Academic Purposes (EAP), Second Language Writing, and Corpus Linguistics. Abstract Plagiarism is becoming more widespread in all types of educational institutions (Park, 2003) . In Vietnam, this academic dishonesty has received little attention in teaching and training at the tertiary level (Hoang, 2014; Nguyen & Filipi, 2017; Nguyen, 2018; Tran, 2021; Phan, 2006) . To bridge this gap, the current study aims to investigate Vietnamese students'perceptions of plagiarism in English academic writing before and after receiving plagiarism tutorials. Before the training, 44 sophomore students were asked to write an essay at home with the purpose of checking for plagiarism, and 10 students were randomly invited to the interview. The findings show that thirty-five out of forty-four students did plagiarize (30% to 90%), as reported by Turnitin software. The understanding of plagiarism among students was poor and they thought that plagiarism was not a big deal. They also did not know how to avoid plagiarism by using citations and quotations in writing. According to these findings, the content of plagiarism tutorials was determined and designed based on the standard of the American Psychological Association (APA) . The content of crediting sources includes plagiarism introduction, types of plagiarism, crediting sources, and citing references. They discovered several misconceptions as well as new information about plagiarism after the training. It is suggested that language teachers should consider applying integration and interaction principles to the pedagogy to mitigate the prevalence of plagiarism in English academic writing. Furthermore, plagiarism tutorials such as seminars or workshops should be provided for all students from various departments to raise students' awareness of plagiarism in education. Keywords: Plagiarism, crediting sources, Vietnamese undergraduates 1. Introduction The widespread popularity of the Internet enables learners to get access to numerous databases (Comas-Forgas & Sureda-Negre, 2010; Park, 2003) . However, it has some negative impacts on many fields, especially plagiarism in the academic community (Aasheim et al., 2012; Maurer et al., 2006; Tran, 2012) . With the Internet, most information is available to access, so students might be easier and faster to copy from others and paste them into their work (Batane, 2010; Pecorari & Petric, 2014) . Thus; plagiarism, significantly increasing in college environment (Scanlon & Neumann, 2002; Zimitat, 2012), attracts much concern from educators (Hu & Sun, 2017; Pecorari, 2013) . In Western education, plagiarism is strictly controlled because it is a matter of copyright infringement, brainpower, and professional ethics. In the United States; for example, if students plagiarize, the punishments may contain“academic integrity training exercises, social work, transcript notation, suspension, expulsion, revocation of degree or certificate, and possibly even referral of the case to legal authorities”(Maurer et al., 2006, p.1053) . Hence, this issue should be avoided in education. In order to reduce plagiarism, a majority of researchers (Aasheim et al., 2012; Biliæ -Zulleet al., 2004; Maurer et al., 2006; Razera et al., 2009; Sarlauskienea & Stabingis, 2014; Tran, 2012; Tran et al., 2018; Vernon et al., 2001) suggested that teachers should use effective plagiarism detection software and provide plagiarism tutorials. Accordin

FAQs

What does the study investigate about plagiarism tutorials?

It investigates whether a plagiarism tutorial program changes Vietnamese students’ perceptions of plagiarism when practicing English academic writing.

How were plagiarism findings gathered before the training?

Forty-four sophomore students wrote essays at home, and Turnitin software checked for plagiarism; ten students were randomly invited for interviews.

What were students’ main problems identified in the findings?

Students showed poor understanding of plagiarism and believed it was not a serious issue, and they lacked skills to avoid plagiarism using citations and quotations.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Ivy