Unveiling Plagiarism Practices in Iranian English Language Students’ Theses

Abstract

The present study sought to investigate the prevalence of plagiarism in graduate theses submitted by Iranian students. To this end, a corpus comprising 43 Master's theses in Translation Studies and 46 Master's theses in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) was analyzed utilizing the iThenticate plagiarism detection software. The content of the theses was scrutinized to identify instances of plagiarism, defined as the verbatim reproduction or paraphrasing of passages from published sources without proper citation. The findings revealed several cases where students had paraphrased entire excerpts from books or journal articles without providing adequate citations. Furthermore, the data showed a higher incidence of plagiarism in Translation Studies theses relative to TEFL theses, with Chapter 2 exhibiting the most pronounced discrepancies. Although the degree of overlap between source texts and student work was substantially greater in TEFL theses, the extent of plagiarism, as defined by the verbatim reproduction of copyrighted material, was more prevalent in Translation Studies theses. A chi-square test corroborated the presence of a statistically significant difference between the frequencies of plagiarism in the two disciplines under examination.