An Analysis of Patchwriting Practice in English Education Department Students' Academic Writing

This research investigated students’ patchwriting in academic writing. This research examined the form of patchwriting conducted by English education students and investigated students’ strategies to avoid patchwriting in their writing. The participants were purposively selected; they are English education students’ class of 2018 who already did the Seminar Proposal in the odd and even semesters of the 2021-2022 academic year and got an A in the academic writing class. The data collection was collected using two data instruments: document analysis (students’ proposal) and interview. There were five proposals to be analyzed, and also five participants were interviewed. From document analysis, the results show that there were six forms of patchwriting; word-level, phrase-level, clause-level, text-level, combination-level, and no changes-level. The form that most likely occurs in students’ academic writing is word-level. The interviewed results show that there were four strategies from students to avoid patchwriting; learning more deeply about paraphrasing, using translation technique, understanding text before writing, and practicing more often. From the analysis of this study, it can be concluded that currently, students did not have intention to plagiarize when writing proposals, but they lacked knowledge about how to paraphrase properly and correctly so that they fell into patchwriting.