Developing a Critical Response, Avoiding Plagiarism among Undergraduate Students

Writing critical essays is an integral part of the undergraduates’ learning experience especially within the Literature in English programme at the School of Language Studies and Linguistics, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Every literature course including Critical Appreciation, Gender Identities and Selected Literary Works, which were the focus of this research project, requires the learners to discuss and present in written form pertinent issues in an analytical and engaging way using relevant citations from published materials. However, we found that our learners face significant problems in these areas. Some of the problems were rudimentary and could be dealt with through personal consultation. Nonetheless, most of the problems faced by our learners appeared more fundamental including the inability to discuss the issues in a critical manner, lack of paraphrasing skills and doing correct in-citations, purely summarizing the text without creating relevance with the topic and committing acts of plagiarism. As an intervention strategy, we incorporated and expanded certain available approaches that assist students to acquire the main skills they require in order to develop educated responses and write critical essays for literature.