Literacy in the digital age: copy and paste among students

Abstract

Copy and paste among students is considered as plagiarism and prohibited for academic honesty reasons. However, it addresses the “new literacy studies” issue of reading and writing at the digital age, and that is what this paper aims to explore, in order to raise some implications for teaching writing at the university. We propose to analyze the practice of copy and paste in terms of enculturation: this is a spontaneous practice of young generations which is not accepted as a legitimate one, facing issues of the authorship and of the sources of texts and knowledge. We deal on the one hand with the culture of “digital natives” and on the other hand with academic expectations and students’ difficulties. Copy and paste appears to be an interesting point to better understand the process of writing from sources instead of focusing only on requirements of citing sources.