The Internet – Friend or Foe of Academic Plagiarism
The Internet – Friend or Foe of Academic Plagiarism

Summary/Abstract: Teaching English for specific purposes (ESP) is a complex field, in which students are encouraged not only to develop their proficiency skills in the four main areas of language development – i.e. reading, listening, writing and speaking – but also to acquire and develop a series of competences that would enhance their creativity, flexibility, information processing and problem-solving ability. This multifold approach could justify why one of the major issues in teaching ESP is represented by efforts to eliminate plagiarism from the students’ written work. As the Internet has become more and more part of students’ research and of their academic, as well as personal life, plagiarism has increased significantly. Although researchers are still debating whether the Internet is one of the causes of the expansion of plagiarism in the academic world or it is simply a tool that makes plagiarism easier to track than in the past, one cannot fail to observe that there is a strong connection between technological advancement and wide-spread access to the Internet and plagiarism. This article aims to provide a twofold analysis of this connection. On the one hand, it will present ways in which the Internet can actually contribute to students’ tendency to plagiarise. On the other, it will show how it can help ESP teachers identify cases of plagiarism, as well as provide support to both students interested in improving their work and avoiding plagiarism and to teachers through anti-plagiarism software. Among other examples of software aimed to track plagiarism, references will be made to the anti-plagiarism programme used at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies to check bachelor’s graduation papers and master’s dissertations before they are accepted and proposed for the defence exam.

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