CCR 720: Pennycook (1996) "Borrowing Others' Words"

Pennycook, A. (1996). Borrowing Others’ Words: Texts, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism. TESOL Quarterly, 30, 201-230.

Executive Summary

Alastair Pennycook is a professor of TESOL and Applied Linguistics at University of Technology, Syndey. According to his faculty website at UTS, Pennycook is widely published in the field of linguistics, particularly regarding investigations of culture, identity, and language within pop culture, the globalization and colonization of English, TESOL, and, finally, textual policies regarding plagiarism. In accordance with this last topic of inquiry, Pennycook addresses the issue of plagiarism for a TESOL audience in his article, “Borrowing Others’ Words: Texts, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism” (1996). Here, Pennycook attempts to complicate Western ideas of textual borrowing practices in order to propose that writing instructors recognize that “All language learning is to some extent a process of borrowing others’ words and we need to be flexible , not dogmatic, about where we draw boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable borrowings” (227). Instead of acting as detectives searching for illegitimately used language and signs of plagiarism in student writing (p. 203), then, Pennycook proposes that teachers begin to understand that plagiarism is a complex concept, one that has been historically and culturally shaped by Westernized assumptions about textual production, ownership, and learning practices.

Pennycook dedicates most of the article to arguing that definitions of plagiarism are culturally influenced. First, Pennycook exemplifies his argument by historicizing Western ideas of authorship and originality. Explaining how our understanding of plagiarism has been informed by premodern textual practices (where only the divine word of God was written) and modern textual practices (where the inventions of literary writing, printing, and copyright have influenced the belief that to be creative an author must be individual and original), Pennycook goes on to argue that these assumptions about authorship are faulty since we’ve long recognized and accepted textual borrowing and coauthoring practices. In postmodern times, Westerners have acknowledged textual borrowing (i.e. Romans borrowing from Greeks; Benjamin Franklin borrowing tropes and aphorisms; famous plagiarists such as Edgar Allen Poe and Martin Luther King borrowing from other authors), and we have embraced philosophical theories about how language and discourse socially constructs individuals: “We are not speaking subjects but spoken subjects, we do not create language but are created by it” (209). Pennycook questions, therefore, why we are able to recognize the complexities of authorship, textual borrowing, and originality, yet we still treat plagiarism dogmatically in our classrooms.

Pennycook further demonstrates how these textual practices and conceptualizations of authorship are indeed cultural assumptions by comparing such practices to those in Chinese contexts. Although Western thought has influenced much criticism of Chinese learning practices as being backward, simplistic, and countering creativity since they have heavily depended on structured memorization practices, Pennycook reminds readers that Westerners used to value memorization as a learning practice in our not too distant past. Furthermore, Pennycook illustrates that memorization can serve more advanced purposes than rote learning since repetition often leads to a deepened understanding and to new sophisticated ideas about a given concept. Reporting on his interviews with Hong Kong students accused of plagiarism, Pennycook concludes that many students see hypocrisy in the way that (a) they are expected to write without borrowing from sources yet they have not been prepared in their schooling to do otherwise; (b) they observe how their instructors borrow sources during class without citing them yet as students they are not permitted to do the same; and (c) they are charged with not learning a subject when they borrow from other texts yet that’s how they have successfully learned language and other subjects in the past.

Historicizing Western assumptions about authorship, plagiarism, and creativity and drawing on his own research of textual borrowing and memorization practices in Hong Kong, Pennycook concludes “that many of the ways we approach supposed plagiarism are pedagogically unsound and intellectually arrogant” (227). He proposes, then, that instructors treat these issues flexibly, with consideration to the complex backgrounds of our students, and with the recognition that the concepts themselves are too complex to treat dogmatically in the classroom.

Quotable Quotes:

· “Because all language learning is, to some extent, a practice of memorization of the words of others, on what grounds do we see certain acts of textual borrowing as acceptable and others as unacceptable?” (202).

· “Ironically, once the spectre of doubtful ownership is raised, teachers start to look for grammatical errors as a sign of good writing and to become suspicious when such errors are crucially absent….From being teachers constantly in search of sophisticated and standard language use, we become detectives in search of evidence that some chunk of language has been illegitimately used” (203).