EFL teachers’ use of plagiarism detection software: A usability study

Abdul Syahid

Abstract


EFL teachers sometimes struggle harder to prevent their students’ committing plagiarism because the students’ limited EFL proficiency could be a cause of plagiarism. To prevent plagiarism, one of the methods widely employed is the use of plagiarism detection software such as Plagiarism Checker X. To assess how useful, easy to learn, easy to use, and satisfying the software was for them, 30 EFL teachers took anonymously an online 30-item questionnaire of 7-point Likert scale after they had downloaded and run a free version of the software. High mean agreement ratings across the four dimensions were revealed as 28 items were highly positively perceived between 6 (agree) and 7 (strongly agree) and two items were rated between 5 (slightly agree) and 6 (agree). The study showed that the software was useful for checking similarities between texts, easy to learn and use and could satisfy the teachers. They could arm themselves with the software to prevent plagiarism. As one of the first attempts to evaluate the usability of text-matching software from the EFL teachers’ perspective, this study has research and educational implications as it highlights avenues for preventing plagiarism via the software usability evaluation. 


Keywords


usability study; plagiarism detection software; plagiarism prevention; teachers of English as a foreign language

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References


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