ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates some of the reasons why first-year students 'plagiarize', or are thought to be plagiarizing. The problem of plagiarism may arise from a situation where the student learning a new discourse is unable to do anything other than use the words of the texts in her writing, as a way of 'trying on' the discourse. It may arise where the student's lack of confidence in her reading and her ability to paraphrase leads to overdependence on text. The reproduction of discipline-specific terms may be appropriate, and the reproduction of chunks of language that the learner has stored in her memory may be evidence of a normal language learning process, rather than plagiarism. Underlying 'plagiarism' may also be the experiences of the text as a set of facts, or as authoritative book to be respected through faithful imitation. The chapter contains Bakhtin's term hybridization to describe the contestation between different discourses, past and new, as represented in student writing.
