Phrasal intertextuality: The responses of academics from different disciplines to students’ re-use of phrases

•We surveyed and interviewed academics about their views of students’ phrasal re-use.•Phrases are seen as acceptable if generic, widely used, without opinion, unoriginal.•Academics consider that re-using phrases can help students to think and write.•Academics approach phrasal re-use identified by Turnitin in different ways.•We recommend raising awareness among L2 writers about acceptable phrasal re-use.

There is a recognised need for student writers to develop an awareness of the role of phraseological constructions in their reading of academic texts and in their own academic writing. However, there remains a suspicion that phrasal re-use from texts is a form of plagiarism, since it involves copying and using other people's words. This paper reports on a study which aimed to explore the boundaries of acceptability for phrasal re-use through a survey of 45 academics at two UK universities and follow-up interviews of eight respondents representing a range of discipline areas. We found there was broad agreement among participants about the conditions for acceptable re-use of academic phrases, but rather less agreement about which phrases met these conditions, though one category of phrases appears to be generally acceptable. In addition, there was recognition that phrases could be useful to help students’ thinking, and to help their writing by providing a scaffold of support, a means of organising ideas and an improvement in writing style. However, there was some disparity in tutors’ views of these phrases if they were identified by text-matching software. The study implies that more awareness of re-usable academic phrases would be useful to L2 writers.