Two first-year students’ strategies for writing from sources: Patchwriting or plagiarism?

In this paper we report a case study of two first-year students at a university in Hong Kong doing the same writing assignment that required the use of sources. We explore the students’ understanding of plagiarism, their strategies for composing, the similarity between their texts and source texts, and the lecturer's assessment of their work. The analyses in the study drew upon textual comparisons between student texts and source texts,...