ABSTRACT
A number of years ago, when I was teaching at Xiangtan University in China, I asked my first-year undergraduate English majors to write a brief biography of a well-known person (such exciting tasks do we set our students). When I was grading these, I came across one toward the bottom of the pile that had a strange quality to it. It was a short piece on Abraham Lincoln (Why Abraham Lincoln? I wondered), written in rather simple but perfectly “correct” prose: “Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in 1809 …” (or words to that effect). It had the ring of a text from elsewhere, of language borrowed and repeated. Because I was at the time supervising my fourth-year students’ teaching practice in Yiyang, a small town in the north of Hunan, I asked one of them what he thought about this text. He looked at the first two lines and smiled. The text, he explained, was from one of the high school textbooks. So did that mean, I asked, that it had been copied? Well, not necessarily, the student replied, and then demonstrated that he too knew the text by heart: “Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin …” When I got back to Xiangtan University, I sought out the first-year student and asked him about his text. He explained that although he felt that he had not really done the task I had set, because I had asked them to do some research prior to writing, he had felt rather fortunate that I had asked them to write something which he already knew. Sitting in his head was a brief biography of Abraham Lincoln, and he was quite happy to produce it on demand: “Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin …”
