Turnitin as both an enabler and deterrent of educational development in English language essay writing

Abstract

Ample availability of academic resources on the Internet has intensified opportunities for plagiarism, especially in English language writing tasks. With the outbreak of Covid-19, educational institutions have shifted to online teaching and learning tools, and Turnitin is one of such tools that have become essential. Although Turnitin is not a plagiarism software per se, it is a technological tool that can be used to detect possible cases of plagiarism. Literature in the field illustrates how the main objectives behind using Turnitin are to foster critical thinking skills and to develop writing competence of the students. Nevertheless, realisation of these objectives remains sceptical due to high percentages of similarities that the Turnitin tool produces after processing students’ essays. Hence, it is not only the percentage of similarities that matters; the content of the similarities is equally significant. A desktop study was conducted using a set of four existing student essays that were submitted via Turnitin. The students were doing an English language course at a tertiary institution in Namibia during the Covid-19 pandemic. Critical Discourse Analysis was used as a theoretical and methodological base of analysis, leading to identification and understanding of contextual educational challenges experienced at the micro-level of society. Out of 1 790 essays that were submitted via Turnitin, a sample of 241 essays with high percentages of Turnitin similarity were analysed. The analysis was aimed at establishing the extent to which tertiary students were likely to plagiarise when writing English essays, based on not only high Turnitin similarity percentages, but also the content of the similarities, to establish whether the use of Turnitin fostered students’ critical thinking skills or not, whether using Turnitin enabled development of their writing skills, and also whether Turnitin and its associated institutional punitive measures deterred plagiarism amongst students or not.