Letramentos acadêmicos: o plágio na construção dos textos de alunos de Secretariado Executivo?

Abstract

Producing texts in the scientific context is a complex activity that requires skills from the student that go beyond the knowledge of genres, such as understanding, organizing and interpreting the knowledge which was already produced. Considering the fragility or lack of these skills, many academic students commit plagiarism and this is the central theme of this thesis. Facing this problem, this qualitative and quantitative research aims to verify if and how the academic plagiarism is present in the students texts from the Executive Secretariat course at a public university in Paraná state. For this reason, students and professors from this course were interviewed in order to check the main difficulties in relation to the internship writing reports and a pedagogical intervention was done which made it possible to follow the development of the writing skills of paraphrases and quotes in the 2019 class and it was also possible to confirm the plagiarism problem. A set of eight internship reports were analyzed, those reports are the final papers from these students. An online tool, DOCxWEB was used to detect the plagiarism in these texts that compares the text that is analyzed with the information available on the internet, in order to find similarities in writing or possible copies. After the analysis the plagiarism excerpts were distinguished from word blocks (sequence of words commonly used in texts). In addition, the types of plagiarism found were classified in the texts based on their degree of severity and it was realized, when comparing the texts produced in the intervention with the writing of the reports, that there was progress in the students writing after the intervention. This research is based on the approach of Academic Literacies proposed by Lea and Street (1998), which recommend that the teaching of writing at the university should provide the domain of both textual and social skills. Furthermore, it goes with Ivanič's (2004) ideas in relation to writing as a guide for social practices and also in the teachings of Krokoscz (2011, 2012), Swale and Feak (2012), Coughlin (2015), Svincki and Mackeachie (2015) and Seide (2018) about plagiarism and paraphrases. Based on the results, it was possible to conclude that an anti-plagiarism pedagogical policy must be adopted in educational institutions and, as a suggestion, at the end of this thesis, valid recommendations for teaching writing at a higher level were provided.