“My Honor is My Life”: Sturm Brightblade of the Dragonlance Saga and Middle English Arthurian Knighthood

Arthuriana has a long history of adaptation and appropriation in medieval and contemporary works, and the tradition of such textual borrowing and reworking continues in contemporary “genre” novels, particularly those that invoke associations with knights, honor, and codes of chivalry. One such example are the novels and short stories of the Dragonlance setting. Sturm Brightblade is positioned as a knight who adheres to a code of honor and is given Arthurian character traits, narrative arcs, and a backstory by the various authors that have fleshed out his history. The texts in the Dragonlance setting knowingly use appropriated elements from Middle English Arthurian works and assign them to Sturm Brightblade to give him proper positioning as a knight that would fit in with Arthur’s legendary Round Table.

Between Textual Borrowing and Forgery. On Compilatory Practices of Medieval Universal Chroniclers Based on Martinus Polonus

The author’s goal is to add to the understanding of the issue of where the border line is that marks the passage from an enlarged copy (an augmented or developed version) of a given chronicle to an independent authorial entity. In this context a side question arises concerning the acceptability of textual borrowing in the face of medieval authorial practices and conventions, i.e. where compiling ends and falsifying begins. The aforementioned issues are discussed on the basis of five historiographical texts composed between the mid–thirteenth and the third quarter of the 15th cent. Their common denominator is their affinity with the famous Chronicle of Popes and Emperors by Martin the Pole (or of Oppavia). Examining the character of the borrowings, their ideological stance, and their political opinions, the author reaches the conclusion that it was not the copy–and–paste technique frequently employed by the chroniclers, but their intentions that decide whether the resulting works should be treated as new entities, sometimes even forgeries.

Constitutional Innovation and Imitation in the American States

The widespread adoption of written constitutions is one of the most notable developments in institutional design in politics over the past 250 years. The American states offer a rich place to study constitutional innovation and imitation as being among the first political bodies to adopt constitutions and also given that they often replaced them, in both cases innovating and learning from one another. In this paper, we use quantitative text analysis to identify constitutional innovation and to investigate patterns of imitation. First, we find substantial textual borrowing between state constitutions. On average, 20 percent of a state’s constitutional language was borrowed directly from another state constitution. Second, states were more likely to borrow text from geographically proximate states, from temporally proximate state constitutions, and from states that shared similar partisan profiles. Finally, we offer a brief discussion of the most influential constitutions as an exploratory example for extending our approach of identifying textual innovation and imitation. These findings offer new contributions to both the study of constitutional design and institutional diffusion.

Textual Borrowing in Dissertation Writing: Perceptions of Supervisors and Supervisees

The existing literature shows issues pertinent to students’ inappropriate textual borrowing behaviors require further examination. Our study aims to address two questions: What are the reasons why postgraduate students’ misuse their dissertation sources? How do the dissertation supervisors react to students’ inappropriate source use, if any? In this situated qualitative study (Atkinson, 2005), we used data collected through in-depth email interviews with two applied linguistics postgraduate students and their dissertation supervisors. Regarding the analytical process, the researchers condensed the provisional themes through techniques suggested by grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). The results reveal that causes for postgraduate students’ misuse of sources include students' lack of access to literature, poor literature-searching and documenting skills, and lack of instructional support on using literature. Supervisors have neither identified nor addressed the source misuse in their feedback given to students. This finding suggests the university's regulating culture/pedagogical support and cross-culturally variant perception of plagiarism are crucial to our understanding of textual plagiarism among postgraduate students. The commonly suggested language proficiency may not be perceived as a cause of plagiarism in the current study. The discussion includes implication for a need to provide students with a disciplinary appropriate way of citing sources.

Students’ Paraphrasing in the Literature Review Section of Research Proposal

The objective of this qualitative study is to investigate the students’ paraphrasing in the literature review section of research proposal. Six English Department students, Universitas Negeri Gorontalo were selected as the respondents. The study reveals that the paraphrasing of three students falls under a moderate revision category, and the other three are in the category of near copy. Such a result is based on the results of the students’ paraphrasing and their understanding of the concepts of effective paraphrasing, namely comprehension of good paraphrasing, analytic reading skills and its correlation in applying paraphrasing strategies, and citation mechanics. On that ground, the study suggests that improving students’ concept of paraphrasing in reviewing the literature is a necessity. Related stakeholders are urged to help the students understand the idea of quality paraphrasing. Further research about paraphrasing to investigate other relevant issues and other textual borrowing mechanics is essential.

Genre instruction, textual borrowing, and foreign language writing: Graduate teaching assistant perspectives and practices

Although writing plays a significant role in communication, 21st century literacies and academic foreign language learning, little research has investigated approaches to and instructional practices of writing in foreign language (FL) contexts. To address this gap, the current study explores how postsecondary FL teachers conceptualize writing instruction and apply their conceptual knowledge in the classroom. Using a sociocultural theory perspective, this qualitative study focuses on genre-based writing instruction and the teaching of textual borrowing among three graduate teaching assistants in a lower-level French as a FL course. Findings, based on analysis of classroom observations, teaching materials, and interviews, demonstrate that participants’ conceptualizations and implementation of textual borrowing were emergent, variable, and influenced by their everyday understandings and experiences of writing. These findings suggest several implications for FL writing instruction and teacher professional development and lay the groundwork for future investigations into how writing pedagogy is implemented in postsecondary FL programs.